HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jonsmit

17 karma · joined November 27, 2015

submissionscomments
jonsmit··on Why hasn't functional programming taken over yet?
Because most people are not smart.

And because customers will pay more for software with bugs in it.

jonsmit··on Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
Companies have a long history of saying one thing privately and another thing publicly. If it were public then it wouldn't be a rumor.
jonsmit··on Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
Yes x1000!!!
jonsmit··on Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
Thanks
jonsmit··on Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
They can both be true. I think the valuation will be telling.
jonsmit··on Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
How much? I know it's undisclosed but it would be very interesting. Hopefully someone leaks it.

The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.

I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)

jonsmit··on Silicon Valley: Season 3 Tease (HBO)
I think it's likely that the tech industry downturn will make the show less funny. Like that oil show.

But if anyone could do it Mike Judge can - that guy is a genius

jonsmit··on Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town
Anecdotally I see a lot of empty apartments here in SF. Not as bad as London though. I basicslly had an entire massive luxury apartment complex to myself. I would walk around the halls drinking with friends carrying a prop ax pretending we were in the shining. Good times.
jonsmit··on Which dating apps are winning the hearts of the world?
It's niche marketing. If they are still interested after a few weeks of messaging they are more likely to settle and less likely to bounce after the next shiny.
jonsmit··on You weren't born to just write code and die
I have not read the article yet but that sounds like good advice to me
jonsmit··on Machine Intelligence in the Real World
The article does a great job at helping create a language around the ML/AI field to help laymen reason about it. Shivon did a similar taxonomy based article last year titled The Current State of Machine Intelligence - also a good read.

Unfortunately Bloomberg Beta has the same blinkers on that the rest of the VC industry has. They use Context Relevant as an example but don't disclose their investment. Context Relevant is currently undergoing layoffs after recently kicking out their founder and CEO. I've been watching them for years, their pitch was classic VC bait. Even as an outsider I could tell that their tech stack and corporate culture was not going to work. Their glassdoor reviews makes for interesting reading. I've been using Context Relevant as a bellwether for the rest of the industry as I expect when they can no longer hide their losses there is going to be a whole class of data science / big data / ml VC funded service companies that will go belly up around the same time.

Which has me wondering how Bloomberg Beta will fair after that. I'm sure Mike Bloomberg will have bigger things to worry about at that point in time. People get sick of paying for fancy expensive charts showing them precisely how much money they're losing very quickly.

Anyway - that's enough pessimism from me for one day :)

TL;DR

A good read, but take with the usual prescription of a giant grain of salt