It is not about the instrument alone but also who is playing it, and how, certainly. Here is violinist Hilary Hahn playing Bach Partita No. 3 -- it is emotionally moving, to the human ear. It represents so many years of her training and performing.
Her instrument is a Vuillaume, and this instrument was owned by Pagnini. (Paganini had an unfortunate betting habit. He lost his favourite Stradivarius in one of those betting bouts. Later, the French luthier Vuillaume built him one just like his Stradivari. Paganini liked it as much as his lost instrument).
Irvy Gitlis talking about his Stradivarius, 1713. Note his awe of the instrument builder even though it is only a "piece of wood with a string attached..." he says
A basic book on finance or accounting to help you scan over the Annual Reports of companies. Their write-up on finance, product strategies, marketing, sales tactics, pricing, compensation, company valuation, etc can familiarize you with many aspects of creating a viable company on your own.
> then went on define net neutrality as the exact opposite
This guy and my former Arizona senator must have gone to the same school. During the campaign, we listened to a PBS feature of this future senator and family from their kitchen, a happy working middle class setting, discussing their views. He was strongly against bailouts he said, and within 4 months after getting elected he voted just the opposite. The public seldom hears these in our media.
I tend to strongly agree. Online meetings for me are direct, initmate and focussed. If we are not prepared yet, we call it off in a minute or two and go do our homework before we decide to meet next time. Productivity, progress made, places where help and collaboriative work is needed, etc are keenly understood in a team.
Such introspection for me began at the end of my college days – Books and essays by Herman Hess, Camus, and Kafka. Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann was a high point. Its interesting that its these books that prepared me for the Bible, to start understanding it an entirely new way. But dont miss reading Steinbeck :-)
> There is not multiple ways of doing things (at a presentation level).
Love the insight. Established businesses like banks look for this kind of stability. And upstarts who build from ground up to challenge status quo, they go on to figure out ways to win with es6 and their friends.
The puzzle is, when and how will this state of affairs (running legacy technology) change. Is it because C-suite movers and shakers doesn't have skills to bring about change? Or is it that things we take as trusted and agile modern systems and methodologies discussed here in HN happen to be things that the market at large will not bet on for a forseeable future.
A nice application oriented book is the 'Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang' by Gene I. Sher, from Springer. It has the code and a model for distributed agents (for neural networks in biology)
I recently went half way in a project using Erlang back-end but didn't get to a production stage mainly due to political reasons in my organization. Mnesia (Erlang’s distributed database) is remarkable and in the Erlang way it comes completely packaged with the system. My only gripe is that documentation overall is a bit hard once you start digging in. The OTP book mentioned is good but may be a bit dated (but we can figure out what is amiss still). I am not sure whether drivers for accessing external databases such as Mongo, Postgresql etc are actively maintained. (Edit: when I check it now it looks like the drivers are recently updated!)
This reads like a comedy now, the flow of logic faultless, reminding us how fleeting these technologies are along with the anxieties we have about them taking over the world.
Just by the fact the a language is well engineered doesn't make it a popular language in the industry. The time and the way in which it appears makes a difference. When C appeared (from Bell labs) it fit nicely with the Unix ecosystem. There was a better engineered language already here, PLM, but the industry couldn't take and run with it as easily. The time point of Perl 5 successes is another example (and contrast that with the appearance of Perl6 more recently). Java, when it was introduced, was not well engineered at all but it came at a certain point in object orientation that the software engineering community had been striving toward.
"Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win when the Stakes are High" by Jeff Thull. When selling enterprise software, you have to convince many decision makers, there is often no point person to sell to. You may not know some of them even exist until its too late. One needs a process to organize such sales undertaking. This book talks about it.
"Elizabeth I and her Circle" by Susan Doran from OUP, and related biography. What got me glued to the 1500's reign of Elizabeth I is her art of far reaching strategic management when organizational resources are sketchy, and living in times of great social uncertainty.
How is memory consumption on Fedora 27? I am using Fedora 24. When I check with 'free' after it boots, slightly more than half a GB is used on my laptop. In any case, thanks to the team for a very fine open source OS from RedHat.
Those 1980's were quite messy too. Larry picked a robust solution (SQL) to build upon, something the market desperately needed and he somehow grasped it better in the smoke and noise of the day. Of course this is not the only ingredient for them to rise above the heap. The company I worked at that time was a Sybase shop and Sybase SQL performed so much better than Oracle then. An ability to sell aggressively, staying power in improving a good technical vision, etc. is also needed just as it is today.
English Conductor Sir. John Eliot Gardiner, who grew up singing and learning Bach cantatas as a child, he has published a lovely book "Bach: Music in the Castle of heaven". I think these lines from the very opening of his book will also enlighten us --
"Bach the musician is an unfathomable genius; Bach the man is all too obviously flawed, disappointingly ordinary and in many ways still invisible to us. In fact we seem to know less about his private life than about that of any other major composer of the last 400 years. Unlike, say, Monteverdi, Bach left behind no intimate family correspondence, and very little beyond the anecdotal has come down to us that can help in painting a more human portrait or to allow a glimpse of him – as son, lover, husband or father. Perhaps there was a fundamental reluctance in him to pull back the curtain and reveal himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he turned down the opportunity to submit a written account of his life and career when the opportunity arose. The limited, heavily edited version that we have inherited is one he himself spun and handed down to his children. It is not surprising some have concluded that Bach the man is something of a bore."
It’s about 15 or so years ago I tried Prolog in an application for analyzing features of images. I remember two things from that – 1. Even though concurrency is elegantly described through guards, implementation turned out to to be not that easy, 2. You have to bypass the beauty of pure logical statements in practice (for example see the 'Craft of Prolog' by Richard O'Keefe on optimizing Prolog code). Once we get to this level of writing Prolog code, you find other standard languages and libraries more competitive and practical.
Enjoyed reading this article. The Greeks had this amazing knack to get into subjects like this and then _write_ about it, isn't. I am thinking of Plutarch's narration of the Ship of Theseus, a good starting point on issues related to identity and relationships among objects, such as products, software componentes, etc. etc., in a large enterprise.
>When I was a teenager, around 15-16 years old, I started to learn C programming by reading the source code for the Linux kernel.
True story from a part of my life from around the time the author mentions: A Fields Medal winner (this is the highest prize in the field of mathematics, for solving hard open problems that puzzled people for centuries) I have known, by himself read the source of Unix (Sun OS) and learned C. He did it when a young PhD student presented him with code related to problems he discussed with this teacher.
This being said, my 9 year old surprised me this week when he showed me an online computer game that someone abandoned which he fixed by going into the code. A few thousands had played it and given it 4 or 5 stars by the time I saw this working. I had no clue that a kid could do something like this in a rather fancy 3D game. I'd say, lets leave the kids to themselves and try our best to help them keep out of trouble as they go along.
I have not really used Rstudio, so I can't compare. I tried RStudio first, but then I was up and running with ESS effortlessly and have looked no further. Its the integration of Emacs with other development enviroments that keeps my life simple :-)
Nothing to do with insurance or VC. Think of a consumer service at Walmart or Home Depot, helping people get very competitive services at prices to fit people's need.
Yes, travel is not a total solution for all 300 million people, but think along the lines of many packaged tour companies in cities who cater for international travellers and can arrange such facilities very efficiently. (I once had dental work done in India, and people don't realize how easy it is, the same kind of thing that you get here.)
I agree with you -- the cost here is prohibitively high for many folks I know, and the politicians makes hay each election season switching groups that will take the most hit.
So HN, this field here is ripe for disruption. Like the kitchen remodeling stand at Lowe’s or Home Depot, why not a booth to connect people to competent doctors and medical specialists in Europe, Russia, or India with all medical records and diagnostics online, allowing people find the most competitive prices and options for their medical services.
Right now for a surgery if you need it, there are least three 14 hour non-stop direct flights daily to India or Dubai where well equipped hospitals and experienced surgeons will be available (added: at a fraction of the cost here)
Instead of your 7th new programming language, learn accounting, read annual reports of corporations, write a profit and loss analysis for three years forward (this will be vague, nevertheless spell it out the best you can) and know worst-case scenarios.
Work out simple and efficient ways for rock solid end-user experience. Anticipate lots of time spent with customers.
Help others, friends are the most valuable. Protect your plans in the early phases and be prudent with your capital, prepare for the long term. Do not be afraid in taking risks, patience will pay.