joeclark77

I wonder if the cost isn't mostly due to manufacturing labor. A good look-over by someone experienced in Lean production might help them map their value streams and get the cost way down.

I suspect part of the reason they're going high-tech with all the IoT devices is so that they can sell a lot of these domestically for profit, and thereby subsidize the ones they send overseas. Not necessarily a bad idea. And if they can get the owners/users to form an online community and capture some learning, the more the better!

Yes! Star Trek's time travel episodes have been notorious since the 1960s. Back to the Future is great, but very much belongs to a certain generation. Doctor Who is a British series, not very well known in the USA. Not everyone would recognize the name TARDIS and know it comes from that show.

Does the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) count as a time machine?

The problem with that is that in most cases, one of the two of you will be more talented and get more traffic, resulting in the other guy getting flamed by commenters, etc. For example Sean Hannity's show used to be "Hannity and Colmes", one right-wing and one left-wing commentator, and poor Mr. Colmes was just outnumbered and outgunned to the point that he quit.

What you're describing is a blog. I wouldn't wait a day for it, since the blogs I follow provide links and commentary within hours. The challenge is to find one that isn't a one-trick pony, i.e. isn't just about one topic like politics.

If you want to launch a new one and be successful, you'll have to find a way to stand out from the crowd. That's probably going to be a "bias" of some kind, or at least a particular philosophy you intend to bring to bear through your commentary.

For example, I would be interested in reading a blog that reports on the news through the lens of black swans and antifragility (see Nassim Taleb's books). It's something I haven't really seen done well.

Good idea. I definitely don't want them "filtering" my results without my permission, but with permission is fine.

The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups <tracking number> to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi (google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use !so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use !g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very rare for me.

I think the touch of human labor has a value of its own, especially in high-end manufacturing and services. If high tech automation allows us all to have precisely perfect mass produced tables and chairs, for example, the value of handmade furniture with its "imperfections" will rise. Just as mega-scale agribusiness produces ever more perfect fruits, vegetables, and grains, has been accompanied by more and more people taking an interest in farmers' markets and local producers.

Now, certainly the mass producers are making money, so I'm not suggesting those industries are poor investments. I'm just thinking that strategically, if you want to find a niche that won't be eliminated by technology, look at the high-quality end of any particular market.

How do you know you can't get a job? Have you tried to apply? Don't be frightened by job postings. Employers tend to ask for the world, including things like requiring 5-10 years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 3 years. Business (at least in the USA, and I think everywhere) is desperate for IT talent. Maybe you won't get your first job at Google or Microsoft, but I'm sure you can find something.

Published my first e-book -- https://leanpub.com/data-engineers-manual -- and made my first sales. 37 paying customers so far, and I just got my first "review" (an encouraging tweet) the other day. Not bad for doing zero marketing and promotion. It has encouraged me to do more of the same.

I think the reason for bringing JS to the backend is that you have to learn it anyway for the front-end, so why not save developers from having to learn two languages. One language = easier learning curve. At least in theory, it sounds reasonable.

Flask. Mainly because I do a lot of different things with web frameworks. Sometimes I'm serving a straightforward web page, sometimes I'm querying a database and rendering a template, other times I'm wiring up a json API, and other times I might be doing some weird data analysis before sending results to a dashboard template. Some of my URLs require three lines of code, some require three hundred.

In Flask, an endpoint is just a Python function, and most importantly, the URL endpoint is right next to the function declaration, so you don't have to keep track of two or three things in two or three different files. (Though the template is a separate file, of course.) To do something new just add an endpoint and a function; and most IDEs let you collapse/hide the function's code when you don't want to look at it, so it's as "clean" as it is flexible, if not elegant.

I want that last sentence on a coffee cup. Or tee-shirt I guess, but I have too many at the moment.

His bio says he's in Austin, which is in (or at least surrounded by) Texas.

What's an open source hardware project, exactly? I'm not being dense, it just has a buzzwordy feel and I'd love some more precise definitions or examples.

I tried Pelican for my blog a while back, and the biggest problem was that I'd forget the syntax of the blog file, and the sequence of actions needed to publish it, if I went more than a day between blog posts. Useful for a professional blogger, I suppose, but not for the casual user. Also, quite complex code to understand, debug, and tweak, compared to the elegance and simplicity of a Flask or even (gasp) PHP webpage.

I have thought, recently, about the possible utility of a dynamic-site generator for things like CMS or even ERP. Imagine you are designing an open source ERP to be customized for different companies. Instead of having sensible tables like "customers", "products", "orders", etc., you have these weird higher-level "table" tables to allow different users to customize their own schemas.

Maybe what you could do to simplify this is create a generator that spits out dynamic sites without the overly abstract data model...

As I scan this article I can almost see Gartner's hype cycle in the background. This is exhibit 1 of a "trough of disillusionment" following a "peak of inflated expectations". 2-3 years from now, look for the "slope of enlightenment".

Ford

It was a long wait, without the benefit of a cryo-chamber, but worth it. Vindication is far and away the best of the series for me. I suppose it'll be another year or so before the next is out.

John C Wright's "eschaton sequence":

Count to a Trillion

The Hermetic Millennia

Judge of Ages

Architect of Aeons

The Vindication of Man

(and one more to come)

It's a combination of hard sci-fi and space opera, based around one essentially immortal character (and his rival, and his girl) carrying out a mission over tens of thousands of years. Mind-blowing scale and yet there's a romance to it.

How about this. A crossword puzzle generator. The user enters a keyword, a person's name, or a date, and your program generates themes, words, and clues associated with that prompt in the newspaper archives. So for example, if I enter the keyword "Trump", your algorithm does some word-association magic (I'm not big on the terminology when it comes to text data) and comes up with a bunch of words and clues drawn from your paper's archive of writing about Mr. Trump...

Clarify: you want to analyze newspaper data? Or you want to do a machine learning project that would make a good newspaper article? Or you want to write a how-to ML article that fits into your newspaper?

I'd like a blend of Svbtle and Medium. Svbtle is the perfect blog editor interface, and I like the way it displays code samples. (Medium's lack of support for syntax highlighting without the GitHub Gist widget is a dealbreaker for me.) But Svbtle has no social features or commenting features, and I like those about Medium. I also like the social "highlighter" feature of Medium. One thing I'd add (back) is the ability to write notes in the margin.

I would use Flask, not Django. I recently had to help a beginner with some Django code and found it inelegant and unintuitive. Flask, by contrast, is simple and straightforward. The setup is four lines of code, and each URL is a Python function, so it can do anything Python can do.

For your "stack", I'd recommend Heroku for the backend, and PostgreSQL for the database because it's supported well by Heroku. The name of the game is that you shouldn't have to spend any time setting up servers, etc. Just test and deploy. There's a good Flask tutorial by Miguel Grinberg in book form and online which uses this stack.

I think you make a mistake in assuming that a child can only learn what the parents can teach. Especially when you consider that our society calls us "children" even up to age 18 or 21, many years beyond the traditional coming of age at 13 or 14.

I'm not homeschooling yet, but have been researching it for some time and may start next year. A heck of a lot of the methodologies that I'm learning about have parents acting as "facilitators" more than teachers. Especially at the middle and high school ages, kids should be able to pick their own books to read, carry out projects, learn skills by self-teaching or by seeking out lessons, etc. The parents' job is to teach the children how to think and how to learn (and even in that regard there are resources to help).

How about Idaho or Nebraska...?

You could rewrite that as, before public schooling, we had competent adults who could start families and businesses of their own at ages 13, 15, 17, etc. And we've replaced that with a system designed to babysit "children" up to age 26 or so. I'd say repealing the 20th century would be a good start.

I think the people downvoting you are unconsciously identifying with the children. Those of us who put ourselves in the parents shoes in these scenarios are upvoting!

Sure, it may be a hassle, but that's no reason not to do it. The more people homeschool, the more powerful their political voice will be. And compared to most other developed countries, the U.S. is pretty friendly to homeschoolers (varying by state). Germany is literally ripping children away from their families for attempting it.

This is why I love HN, for the #Lifehacks. I may use these on my kids...