bontoJR

Sneak Attack By Roger?

Delphi was far superior than all other languages of the time, it had all the necessary bullet points to become what is Java now.

Borland really failed on the marketing and sales side, while providing the best tech, they completely missed the importance of having a strong sales team capable of scaling the language inside corporates, which were the driving force back in the days.

I have a lot of good memories of Borland Delphi 4.0 and 5.0 on Windows 95 and later 98/2000.

Very confusing indeed.

There's also Surströmming which is a swedish type of fermented Baltic Sea herring.

I am somewhat confused about this product. I think the Function as a Service approach has really some good advantages on more classic approaches sometimes, but if I want to go that path, what is the advantage to actually use an open source product and maintain the server with all the maintenance required (security updates, platform updates, handling scale, etc...)?

Wouldn't be an out of the box solution provided by AWL Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc... a better and more straightforward option on this space?

I am just wondering if I am the only one with this opinion, what is your experience on this topic?

I totally agree on that!

A "Swiss Startup" is a startup actually based in Switzerland. As far as I know, foreigners with permanent residence in Switzerland have the same rights of Swiss people, plus more than 25% of population is actual foreigner in Switzerland, so that should not a problem at all.

> Although it is nice to have more funds available, which increases the competition among VCs, the main point is not lack of funds.

I agree on that, on the other hand I don't see the lack of market as a big problem. I like to take Spotify as example, it started in Sweden, which is a market comparable to the Swiss one in terms of size, but after the first prototypes and early versions, it went global almost immediately.

Schneider-Ammann said that a change of mentality is required in Switzerland. He noted that while in the US, business failure is greeted with a “better luck next time” or with a similar attitude, on the other hand, in Switzerland, “if you fail with your business idea here everyone points the finger at you. You are branded a looser”. This seems to be the main goal and I totally agree with him.

IMHO, a company can move to a global scale from the start with the right plan, but it's the mentality and the fact that Swiss VCs care more about patents and product protection preventing Swiss Start-up to compete with the rest of the world, instead of caring about quality of the actual product and picking the right time to enter the market.

I heard some stories about companies collecting 500-800k in seed investment, spending 50% of it in legal fees protecting a product they still have to develop, failing later in execution for lack of cash... this is what, I think, needs to be fixed in Switzerland.

> What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere?

Yes, for that reason a POC I made for a side project costed almost 100 bucks to me (I was the single user)... I never checked the current bill because I was sure the total cost would have been around 15-20... when I got charged I noticed all the previous pushed versions had a single instance running, so the costs were incremental...

These are pretty much the same forecasts Switzerland and Norway were supposed to face when they rejected to join the EU... people losing jobs, Swiss Franc falling, export collapsing, etc... well, it went a little bit in a different way.

OFC leaving is totally a different thing from not being in at all, but still... there are going to be pro and cons, but the economy will adapt as happened in Switzerland and Norway. Some will gain, some will lose, but the general picture can be valid only in 3-5 years after the Kingdom is out, so not before 2022.

That book is by far the best one I ever read about Functional Programming in general, even if you don't want to learn Scala itself it is an amazing reading about FP.

Really? I wasn't aware of that problem in the system, any reference or article about that? I am just curios about the technical details why this was happening.

Considering the current evolution of automation and the global forecast of high unemployment rates, that will be a problem for the whole economy (with Bill Gates suggesting a tax on robots), what are your thoughts about education? We currently educate kids based on a system that assumes the current jobs are going to be there in 15-20 years and for the rest of their lifes. Can startups and technology help in improving education considering the future world considering the current pace of automation in most fields?

I love these kind of articles. For some people it might be a waste of time, but to me is really good to see such amazing willingness to discover the problem. I am tempted to get a pair of AirPods, not totally sure yet, but if in the future I will get one, I will definitely remember this post in case I have troubles with them.

Well done!

I am big fan of Swift and Scala... and, to be honest, for Swift there's a long way ahead before a big system can be deployed... tooling and libs are not there, also not considering that the lack of ABI stability makes the source code necessary for any external dependency.

It was 22 fields and the problem was not serializing/deserializing, but it was a problem with the Scala functions and tuples system not supporting case classes with more than 21 fields. This limitation has been removed since Scala 2.11.

I guess their conclusion is that this is the maximum size for the goal they want to achieve. Can it be bigger without having an impact on the quality of the event?

The GTA (I) style website looks pretty cool! I had to say it...

Mobile (iOS and Android) focused, App Builders Switzerland:

https://appbuilders.ch

Swift focused, with different concept from regular conference:

http://theswiftalps.com http://swiftaveiro.xyz

This works for some "controversial" researches, which can be dismantled. What about successful (or apparently) ones which may lead to tons of $$$ in return? Is there any value to pay for a research which is going to prove someone else was right ending in making their wallets fatter?

Sorry for the informal language, but makes things a little bit more salty.

The big issue right now is funding of replicated research, who wants to fund a research to prove someone else was right? Most of these funds are granted based on potential outcome of the new discovery like: potential business, patents, licenses, etc... not being the first one would probably wipe most of these benefits, cutting down to a small probably getting funded...

Now, straight to the point, who's going to pay for the repeated research to prove the first one?

Yes, with Postgres (which I am most confident to talk about), most precisely using PostGIS, you can do that in a matter of hours using it for geo-queries and indexing for getting important stuff (new, trending, etc...). Plus Postgres is supported basically everywhere in any tech stack. I still don't get one point, why people totally ignore SQL dbs by default with new products? I know MongoBD, RethinkDB, CouchDB, etc... are really fascinating solutions, but why not considering SQL eliminating it by default? I am just curios.

Yes, exactly, in fact I thought he has been caught because of that, not about the credit card thing...

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_name#Female_surnames

> To warrant a criminal charge, Mr. Comey said, there had to be evidence that Mrs. Clinton intentionally sent or received classified information — something that the F.B.I. did not find.

Interesting, I won't pay the taxes this year and I will prove that was unintentionally and see what happens... I am quite sure the outcome is going to be different.

Probably won't happen anything that have been said in the last hours, no rush to Berlin, Dublin, Frankfurt or Paris. The exit has 2 years ahead to happen, in this period there's time to make deals, agreements and keep almost everything like it's now, slowly changing what doesn't work. Moving people is really hard, plus London has a business mentality that is hard to find anywhere else in Europe on the tech/startup scene. Anyway, time will tell what's going to happen. Switzerland lived the exact same situation in the '90s with the fear of having companies and corporation leaving the country in favour of the EU, well, with a hard work and agreements, that have been avoided. I know not joining is far different from quitting, but still, predicting the outcome is absolutely impossibile, UK might become the hottest country for business as can fall and die, both scenarios are equally possibile.

True, but... other countries around the world are producing the very same things, even cheaper, but they are taxed in the EU. China has no major deal with the EU for this reason. UK leaving would open to that possibility that Switzerland decided to open in 2010, balancing what comes in and what goes out and both countries got a major boost in respective goods. Swiss got access to the manufacturing in China for Swiss high tech companies and China got access to the major luxury good produced here, plus bank services, med techs and collaborations with universities like ETHZ.

Because it's unknown and it's actually the same points that have been brought when Switzerland decided to stay outside. The arguments were:

- We are going to be isolated - Our economy will crash - We will struggle to find high educated people - We will just disappear

Now, after almost 25 years we can't say we did the wrong thing, but hey, UK is not Switzerland, it's a totally different economy which different proportions.

I don't think this has to be considered totally bad, it's a sign something HAS to change, but now the brits have to work to make this happen in the very best way, it's an opportunity and a clear demonstration that the actual structure of the EU can't work on this way, this seems to be pretty clear.

Only time will say if the decision was good or not, but which side is going to end this decision is up to the britains, they have to work hard and do it now to make this be a good thing, rather the beginning of the end, starting with keeping Scotland in the UK.

Totally agree with that, I have implemented it as learning project FastCGI and SCGI in Swift few months ago and SCGI seems really weak for a real world project right now, even an easier one. I would also give an extra +1 in recommending to consider interfacing with nginx/lighttpd/Apache.

> This is why things like Bootstrap or other frameworks are so popular, they allow a designer or developer to cover 90% of those scenarios and focus on the important things.

You're definitely right, but this IMO this is a broken model.

Most of the times superior web apps and mobile apps are the ones with extremely well curated UX, maybe even featuring a slim UI. OFC is the product is very revolutionary, you can be still successful with trade-offs in UI/UX, but the second one is far more important than the first one, if you have a shining, super cool bootstrap template, but a horrifying UX, people will definitely walk away and never return. If you have a decent UI, but an outstanding UX, they will stay and give you suggestions (implicit and explicits) in how to improve the UI as well.

Well, to be honest, in the last year a lot of designers have moved to Sketch or similar alternatives, but it's still very common to work with plain screens as start point when working as contractor.