emdowling

I would be very curious to know why he thought he would get away with this. Did he erroneously believe Bitcoin is anonymous? Have there been any interviews with the agent or those around him?

It is in our nature to want the quick, easy solution. That's what has allowed this and other health industries to thrive.

I injured my lower back quite severely 5 years ago while lifting something at work the wrong way. Entirely my fault. Physio, chiropractors, etc did not fix it in the long term - a lot of money spent on temporary fixes. Swimming and gentle weight lifting over the course of 6 months made a huge, lasting difference. Occasionally, I still feel some tightness in that region but a run or yoga session fixes it up very quickly.

I built a digital bank for refugees that would allow them to set up a bank account, move their funds for safe keeping and also store documents securely. Authentication happened entirely through a 6 digit code and facial and voice recognition through use of video. The idea was that refugees or other displaced persons would be able to access their documents and funds through any device, so that they could easily establish their identity and life in a new country.

The other aspect was location verification. Working with NGOs, you could use this authentication method to let displaced persons login at certified locations. This solves two big issues:

1. Family member tracking. Red Cross and other organisations spend millions of dollars each year tracing where family members ended up. It is quite common for families to be split - reuniting them is a multi-year, labour intensive job. Solving that would do the world a whole lot of good.

2. Journey verification. When assessing refugee visa status, governments spend a lot of time trying to verify what journey a particular person took to get there to prove that they are legitimately a refugee. If a refugee could irrefutably prove their journey, then it would dramatically cut down on visa processing times.

We won that hackathon - I just wish I had time to develop it more. Tried to find who to talk to but the idea of using technology to solve the refugee crisis seems a little outlandish to traditional NGOs who (rightly so) place a lot of emphasis on food and shelter over apps.

I would hope that Type 1 diabetics wouldn't get this and being relying on it 100% without consulting their doctor and reading appropriate literature. Apple is also way too visible to be misleading on this.

I think your use of the word "cute" is a bit disingenuous and at odds with the conclusion you draw. "Cute" implies misleading, whereas the scenario you outline isn't misleading at all.

It makes total sense to start where they are starting; they'll get teams of data in a very short space of time (from diabetics and non-diabetics alike) and be able to iterate quite quickly from there.

As a non-diabetic, I want this so much. The impact of sugar and insulin on health is finally getting the attention it needs and I think this could be the innovation that makes health trackers actually useful.

The customer is party who pays you. From that perspective, they are the same.

Customers come before team and ego every single day of the week. If you don't believe that and aren't prepared to do things that have biggest positive customer impact, you should resign immediately.

The thing is that Netflix doesn't really care about "the nerds". They don't need to. I'd wager that less than 0.005% of their user base will actually care enough about this to cancel their subscription. If these changes mean that their content is harder to get and less technically inclined people become paying customers, then that hit is totally worth it.

I used to have a setup like this and those described in other comments, but it just became too hard to worry about. Synology updates breaking things, missing parts on newsgroups, etc. I've replaced it with Netflix and occasionally paying for specific content not available there (like Westworld). It's just 10x easier and about the same price anyway. I fly enough that I get to watch all the movies I want to on IFE. I just don't have the patience or time to put up with the inconveniences of piracy any more.

I'm glad we're seeing utilisation at the 66% level. That extra power is going to be mighty useful for VR. It's going to be really interesting to see what Microsoft reveal there.

I have an Xbox One and a Switch. Personally, I love this combination and Scorpio could be a great upgrade depending on the VR story. While I do miss out on some PS4 games I'd love to play, I don't have enough hours to play the games I already have.

The ideological gap between Switch and the rest of the industry is widening. No doubt the Switch is a cheaper platform to develop for (4K assets are a huge burden) but is that enough of a drawcard? Likewise, are consoles like Scorpio and PS4 Pro becoming too difficult and expensive to develop for, unless you are a AAA studio? The bar gets set so high that smaller studios will find it harder and harder to keep up. I can easily foresee a future where the Switch has an amazing selection of first party, Nintendo games and a killer catalogue of indies, whereas Xbox and PS4 own the third-party, AAA market.

It is hard to see Apple keeping the mini around for much longer. I assume they are simply running down stock and will remove it soon, before end of the year.

AirPlay, AirPrint are still in use. The Air name for Macbook and iPad lines was all about thinness. When introduced, these products had thicker predecessors. It's irrelevant now for iPad, as everything is pretty much the same thickness across all models. For Macbook Air, it is no longer the thinnest product in the line-up. However, Apple can't quite get rid of it just yet - not until they offer a sub $999 Macbook.

I really don't think Apple, with it's war chest, is actively disassembling code to steal it. As has been demonstrated time and time again, they will just buy companies that have awesome tech and IP. Far easier.

Why does it want them back? It really just cares about the social graph. It doesn't need to know what you're saying, just who you're talking to. I've already seen that information used in Instagram: people I chat with more often in WhatsApp have their content (stories and posts) surfaced at the top of my feed.

The biggest issue facing the wearable market is that, despite having all the data, I still don't know what to do with it. We need to correlate cause and effect. It differs dramatically between individuals, so what's true for me is probably not true for you. We have a battle between privacy and usefulness, in that we'd ideally feed data from millions of people into a machine learning algorithm to start helping people actually use and benefit from the data. However, most people don't want to share their intimate health data to the cloud.

Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation.

We still have a long way to go before wearables are truly indispensable, and that's before we start considering the emerging research on gut bacteria and the role it plays.

I would've loved an article this well written and explicit when I was first learning JS (or even any language, really). Really well done with good, practical examples.

Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.

This is one of the big reasons why I don't buy the whole narrative in these parts around Apple abandoning the Mac. They are spending far too much time on improving Cocoa APIs as you mention to be working towards abandoning or deprecating it.

The interesting takeaway for me is that services is now the equal second biggest revenue centre at 9%. It is still way behind iPhone, but it is growing at a phenomenal rate. By all accounts Apple is just getting started with services (e.g.: rumoured original video content, video streaming service) so we can expect this to grow even more.

Finally Apple is capitalising on its install base to sell more addons after sale. This offsets slowing hardware upgrade rates, although not sure if it is enough to offset iPad declines.

The narrative often heard is that if they want to shift to being a services company, Apple would need to dramatically change its org structure. I may be wrong, but no one has ever monetised consumers with recurring monthly revenue as successfully as Apple has (utility companies and mortgage brokers excluded!). And it didn't even need an org restructure!

Preferential voting is a bit useless in a presidential election isn't it? With only two major candidates, wouldn't that result in someone getting like 90%+ of the vote?

Side note: As an Australian, it absolutely blows my mind that voting is not compulsory in more countries. I have no idea why voting isn't compulsory, like taxes.

By all accounts, we won't see another change on the same level as Swift 2.0 -> Swift 3.0 for some time. Having shipped production apps for all major releases of Swift, it definitely feels like the syntax and foundation of the language has settled in 3.0. Now it seems more focused on building on top of that.

Good on him. As others have said, well-communicated move. He is leaving Swift in an excellent position and has set up an outstanding structure where Swift is way more than just one person. He spent more than 5 years building Swift inside Apple, so I can definitely understand he is ready for his next challenge. Can't wait to see what it is!

Personally (and I'm not sure if JIRA fixes this, but Trello gets around it), the biggest issue I have is that Github treats repositories as the only possible context. Say a bug comes in that covers multiple repositories (e.g.: requires a mobile app fix and a backend fix), then you need to create two completely seperate issues and remember to link them manually. This breaks down very quickly. I would much rather issues to optionally exist at an organisation level, with per-repository sub issues stemming from that organisation-level issue.

It also means that someone submitting bugs, say from customer support, must try and figure out where the issue is in order to log it. It's a huge hassle and most just give up and ping an engineer on Slack which is incredibly inefficient.

Trello gets around this by letting you create a "master" issue and link to the individual repository issues. It means engineering can have a bug inbox and triage from there. Still a huge pain and not ideal.

Github also has the "Projects" feature, but it is useless IMO due to the above issue - I wish projects would work at an organisation level.

Call it what you want, but yesterday at 38,000 feet it was absolutely delightful.

Career: Transition from engineering to product management (starting mid-January so getting that one sorted early)

Personal: Mastery in something non-computer related. I've spent my twenties building a career in software, have built a startup, etc but want to end my twenties and begin my thirties with something new to "master" (even though we can't ever fully master something). Increasingly fascinated by freediving and reconnecting with nature and what the human body is capable of.

TIL about the gambling restriction being region-specific.

I guess my question boils down to this: betting on horses and playing a casino slot machine are recognised as gambling and regulated as such. How, when and should apps like Game of War be considered in the same category?

I'm a huge proponent of platform owners getting out of the way when it comes to restrictions (at odds with my use of iOS, but it's a balance of priorities).

When will regulations catch up with this sort of thing? Do Apple/Google have a moral responsibility here? Apple expressly forbids gambling apps, but this is essentially a slot machine with a different mechanic. Apple (not as familiar with Google) have done a great job on iOS giving parents the options to restrict their children making unauthorised purchases, but the settings aren't hugely discoverable.

In this day and age, do we need to consider a digital restraining order that allows a spouse or close family member to block or limit digital addicts? Do Apple or Google have a duty of care here or does it rest with law makers? The concerning part is that these purchases are invisible. If I buy a $1 million boat, others will see that and can intervene. But digital purchases can rack up silently and cause massive damage without anyone realising.

I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue. One side of me says that "it's his money, he can do what he wants" whereas the other side says that society should protect it's weakest, and this man clearly has a gambling problem.

Simple: everyone is looking for the next big platform. The smartphone revolution came by surprise to most and it has taken years for companies to catch up. Everyone is racing because they don't want to be caught with their pants down again.

It's fascinating to see Google and (purportedly) Apple move in a similar direction away from developing their own actual cars and instead building the software platform. It makes a lot of sense for Google, who have always struggled with selling products direct to consumers. It is more surprising for Apple, but makes sense if you look at how they can add the most value.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out. Are cars going to be (even more) commoditised at the low end and differentiated by the platform on top of it (Apple, Google, Tesla) in the same way phone carriers were commoditised by the iPhone? My gut is that they won't (industrial design is a huge part of choosing a car manufacturer), so the dynamics between platform and carrier (Toyota, Fiat Chrysler, etc) are going to be fascinating to see unfold. The traditional car industry moves at such a glacial pace, yet you have two tech titans ceding a lot of control to them.

Of course, you then have the "apps" that will run on top of them, like Uber. How they interplay with it all is another dimension too. Tesla has fired the first shot here by restricting usage of non-Tesla car pooling services. It is a worrying thought to think that buying a BMW might mean I'm locked into only renting out my car through Apple-approved car riding services (and while I can't see Apple creating their own car pooling service, never say never).

Tesla seems to be the only player doing the entire stack from top to bottom. Very reminiscent of early Apple.

I used Karhoo on a few occasions for airport trips and found the experience better than going direct to a minicab company, but only marginally. As other people have said, it didn't offer the same level of timing accuracy as Uber and it took quite a long time to get quote information from providers. Still, sad to see them go. Really only leaves Uber as a viable option for London.