alexsb92

My understanding however from the "Windows 8 Doesn’t Want Your App. Try Again Later" post was that as part of the approval process, MSFT does automatically test the apps in a low performance environment, and if they don't meed specific benchmarks there (example in the post was startup or shutdown time of 2 second, but I can't remember exactly and am on mobile), they will reject the app and tel you to work on it.

So if that's really the case, maybe they are selective with it. Maybe they don't apply the same rigor to their own apps, which would be a shame since you'd think they have to set an example.

Regarding the Twitter clients, I tried Tweetro on my Windows 8. Haven't gotten to use it too much, but it seems kinda cool. Especially the link preview. I'm wondering if you tried it, what's your opinion on it?

As an aside this brings me to one of my problems with Windows 8. When I was in Desktop mode and I first discovered the Side Bar (forgot what it's called) and saw the Share Button, I knew from before that you can use that to update twitter and facebook for example, so i got really excited thinking I had this quick easy way to update twitter and facebook without having to open up the browser. Turns out I was incredibly wrong. When you do click Share, it says "Nothing can be shared form the desktop". Then what is the point of keeping that button in the bar when in the Desktop context? Initially I even thought it was because I had to have a Twitter app open in Metro, but that had no effect.

That looks quite amazing! Thanks!

As an aside, I've actually been meaning to learn about writing drivers for a while, especially in preparation for a uni course. So with windows 8 here and all of it's cool touch gestures, it would be even cooler. So I'm not sure if you would know this, but can you point me towards any resources for essentially simulating touches? I was thinking of building a battle Etch-a-sketch app for a school project, that would actually have two players use two etch-a-sketch systems in drawing stuff. If it was only one user, I could use the mouse pointer, but being two, I probably need touches. I hope I made myself clear enough. If it's better for you, just email me at alexsb92 [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks.

Win+I also brings the settings slide-out on the right, with the shutdown button at the bottom.

When this came up on Reddit earlier today, I read that if the vote passes through and they need a majority people to vote for it, but that doesn't happen, they will make the project a federal one instead of state, so no state money would be used for this, and nobody would be able to do anything against it.

I would say it all depends on the reach. If a company publishes 10 posts a day, without promoting them, then I would think that only a few of the fans will get more than 2 or 3 of the posts that day (if we're to go with the 10%-20% estimate in the article).

Now if you were to promote all those 10 posts, and 99% of your fans would see them all, then most will get annoyed. And if they don't get annoyed within the first day, they will get annoyed soon enough,

Wanted to point out that the Alt+Left key gets broken on their page and you either have to do a Backspace or just click Back.

While I understand the basic idea of "make the idea their own", is there any way you could either maybe expand on that a bit, or point me to an existing blog post or something?

Regarding the communication bit, I definitely agree with the order. While not doing it on purpose, looking back I did notice differences in the responses of people based on how I'd pitch an idea/project at meetups.

One other feature I'd like to see is an "Add to Wishlist" button. Writing the book title in a new tab is quite annoying and this would definitely help me save time.

A small fix, Pebble is actually in Cali full time now. And it's been this way ever since YC 1.5-2 years ago when I interned with them.

The other thing is regarding familiarity, startup focused folks don't strike me as being too fond of familiar environments just for the sake of familiarity, though I realize this is a generalization on my part.

Checked Google.ca. For Colon Help your blog from July of Last year is 5th. The first couple are theirs. And the 4th one is irrelevant; it's about semicolon's.

It's quite shitty that after all this time Romania is still such a piece of work. Every month or so I read up on more stuff regarding it, and thank my folks for coming to Canada 6 years ago.

Do you mind providing a link to the TED talk in question? Been thinking about that kind of future lately, and was wondering what other people (who've probably thought about it for longer) have to say about such future.

Ever since I discovered the keep-things-in-the-same-pocket trick a few years back, the number of times I forget stuff at home got to virtually zero. When it's time to leave, all I have to do is slap all of my pockets to get a feel for what's in them, and that's it I'm done.

Regarding the different pocket layout, I've also limited myself to just using the main ones for my day to day stuff, so two front and two back. Though when i wear cargo pants or shorts I do put my wallet on the pocket halfway my leg as it's more comfortable with sitting.

Same goes for Toronto (GTA), Kitchener, Waterloo, Stratford, Ottawa, Niagara in Ontario, and Montreal and Quebec City in Quebec.

There's tours like those in quite a number of big cities, including San Francisco. Whenever I was in the city, I'd see them all the time.

Though a case can be made that this is mostly irrelevant in Waterloo's case, as for all intents and purposes, everyone in Waterloo who might be interested in what Waterloo has to offer is a student at Waterloo.

As a current student at uWaterloo, I was actually quite saddened reading the article, and knowing that UW could be so much like this, and yet it's so far away from it.

Not sure when you graduated, but as of a year ago, even buildings that used to be open 24/7 have started to close at nighttime. Sure you can still get around by finding an open one, and then going through the tunnels and passageways, but the friction is there. And there is no access from people who are not students. You can probably get in, but I don't think the university is encouraging it.

It is as hard as ever for students to take courses from other faculties, unless you are in engineering where it becomes somewhat easier. Still have to go through different people a number of times in order to get all the paperwork done.

And now we have a new dean of engineering. She's alright, nothing special. However one point where I am completely at odds with her is regarding Coursera type efforts at UW. When interviewed on her inauguration for the Iron Warrior, she stated that she did not want to get into the whole Coursera type courses, the reason being that there were plenty of other schools doing it, and they all had more resources and that the race was lost. Instead she's going to focus on professional development courses for graduates where she's interested in "upgrading practicing engineers", while later stating that only 30% of engineering graduates go on to engineering roles (the rest going in management). As only 30% work in engineering roles, I'd hazard a guess and say that the percentage of professional engineers is even lower.

I find her reasoning for not wanting to invest effort in open courses completely BS. There would be many more people who would find value in those than the professional engineers who will want to take more PDENG or WatPD courses. All those companies have just started, and they are at the very beginning. And the biggest mistake is the type of thinking where this is a competition between Waterloo and other universities.

I'm glad however that due to the IP rules of Waterloo, researchers and students maintain rights over anything they come up with. If that also applies to course materials developed by professors, it might be worthy to go around the administration and talk to professors directly. Though you would still have to deal with the university in the end, so as to publish the courses as being uWaterloo courses. Need to start looking into this.

To finish up this reply, that's already much longer than it needs to be, I think what the university needs is a President who's willing to cut the fat, and make the whole institution lean. Rumors are David Johnston, previous president of UW, had a plan to do just that before being offered his current role of current Governor General of Canada.

Somehow I seriously doubt he will sell SpaceX especially if it's just to turn a profit. Sure in case something happens and all of sudden SpaceX as a business starts flopping, he might end up selling it to other defense and aerospace manufacturers, to at least recoup some costs for whatever shareholders.

Overall I think SpaceX is his baby. Based on interviews and what i've generally read about the man, I think he's gonna stick with it for the long run. I mean hell, he wants to go to Mars as soon as possible in one of his own rockets. That's a dedicated man.

That doesn't mean that people can't complain about it. They could have easily supported multiple locations and credit cards and still streamline the process, and the only users who'd have to deal with it are the ones who need to use the feature.

If there is no automated price scrapping based on the local stores in your area, I think an averaged out "Walmart Price", or "Kmart price" would do just fine. I'm not too sure what the price difference is in Walmart stores across the US, but i'd guess it's not that bad.

I guess that if you notice that price databases to be lacking, you could get users to crowdsource it. Even if only serious power users would fill the numbers at first to make them more exact, it should get the ball rolling.

I can completely correlate to the uneasiness brought by truly realizing the scale of things.

If you do like video games, one that had such an intended effect on me was the first Mass Effect. There are a number of side missions where you descend onto planets in a multi-terrain vehicle and are supposed to check some things out (you can get out of the rover as well). Although for the most part the planets are barren (much like Mars), I found them incredibly effective at sending the scale message across. The most incredible one though, was a side mission on the Moon, with Earth right up above you. Though the scale wasn't 100% accurate, it still made for one of the most impressive moments in video games for me.

I don't necessarily think that will be the case. As far as I knew (and from re-skimming the wiki article), car sickness (and any kind of motion sickness) is caused by the brain seeing different things than what it's processing from the inner ear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness

So it's more up to the individual in question, then the driver (considering a normal, average car ride, not anything in the extremes).

Do you know of any videos where we can hear the sound of that many relays? I believe i've heard sounds similar to what you are describing in movies, but I'm not sure if those were the same thing, or if they were accurate.

That is what I've done at a few projects for work. Worked quite well.

Yeah, in terms of curriculum differences, CS is definitely a lot more theoretical, with heavier math and pure CS courses, while SE has project management components, more programming, some computer science, some Computer Engineering courses and even some Electrical Courses.

In Waterloo's case, the whole "knowing CS, but not how to program" falls flat, since we have an amazing co-op program where you can easily 2 year-ish of experience at different companies by the time you graduate, so most CS students that come out, do come out of the CS with Co-op, and as a result are great programmers.

It wouldn't be too far of a stretch. Starting simply with the knowledge that dreaming happens while in REM, someone could find it logically to switch to an Uberman-type Polyphasic sleep schedule, since one of the biggest advertised advantage of such sleep schedule is dropping into REM a lot quicker due to exhaustion. If Uberman doesn't actually help them in terms of the sleep they need, but they also don't want to give it up, hoping to get all that lucid dreaming, a student could continue it for a a few months, which coincidentally is a school semester. Now you've got a student who is really burned out, and once exam time will crash and burn. Depending on the program, university they attend, and the person themselves, failing a semester could really screw them over one way or another.

At the university that i attend (University of Waterloo, Canada), we actually do have a Software Engineering program which is part of the Engineering department, and a Computer Science curriculum which is part of the Mathematics department. The SoftEng degree owners can even qualify to become professional engineers.

I'm also 99% sure that the two degrees are also common at quite a number, if not the majority of big technical universities in Canada.

I was actually looking at doing something like this about a year ago, before I figured it was virtually impossible at the time. The idea did come out to me after seeing kickstarter a couple of times. I even remember that one of the names I was playing with was Bootstrap.it or something similar. My logic went along the same lines as your edit. People would not only be able to donate monetary funds, but then each company would have access to a network of different individuals, some of whom would be willing to help out with advice, or maybe if one was a lawyer, he'd help them get incorporated, that kind of stuff.

Essentially it's because of SEC. First of all you have (had) the 500 limit for investors, so any fundraiser where only, let's say 400 people, could give money would be rather shitty.

Then the other part was that if you wanted to invest in early stage startups, you have to be an accredited investor. That is you have to either make 200K a year for the last two years (or 300K together with a spouse) or have $1 million in the bank. So again, not too many people fill those requirements.

In terms of companies that were still attempting this, http://www.profounder.com/ is one of the bigger ones. They (sort of) made it work through some loopholes as far as I knew.

I know this was a week ago, but I had this saved for later and just got around to reading it. It seems that you will be getting what you want.

One of the screenshots off the website is this: http://0x10c.com/screenshots/006.png

But in that case wouldn't you be looking to get the essence, the plain text useful stuff of an HTML document, in which case wouldn't parsing using regular expressionism or something be better than NLP? I haven't really done scraping and parsing of documents/text so I'm not too sure.