kcl

> Do me a favor. Ask around to experienced entrepreneurs who have done 3-5 companies and stretching back to at least the mid to late 90s.

Entrepreneurs fitting these criteria are highly likely to be investors. Entrepreneurs today are part-time angels after fewer companies. If such an entrepreneur is giving advice they are likely to possess any bias investors are assumed to possess, that is, if their channel to the less experienced entrepreneur isn't already predicated on the potential for investment.

This would not be a good test for proving or disproving bias.

We chose Permanent because it means long-lasting or durable, but it has a hidden geeky meaning we liked: computing the permanent of a matrix is a #P-complete problem.

The old link referenced pointed to a different page, the release page for the previous version.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Permanent and Numbers is the interface. It's easy to suggest that tablet spreadsheets might all work the same, but if you try a few you'll find they are widely different experiences.

Permanent has cloud support for Box and Dropbox. Numbers supports only iCloud.

Permanent is free, and most people do fine with the free version, so a pro upgrade is generally not required to use the app.

Lua scripting was cool. It was in v1 but hasn't made it into v2 yet. Before you get to the group of users that want scripting/macros on their tablet, there is an enormous group of users that want things like resizing columns and changing colors to work effortlessly. This second group absolutely dwarfs the first. On a tablet this is fairly cutting-edge stuff. So most of our attention has been there.

I need to update my citation:

"Land of Silence and Darkness" is the better source, though both may cover the subject. The two films are closely related. I think I saw them together, hence the confusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Silence_and_Darkness

Calculus in Chinese is still calculus. The sphere is smooth, the cube is non-smooth. That's all it takes.

With respect to Molyneux and Locke, while I believe they get the general idea right, I believe they get the actual answer wrong. The answer to Molyneux's problem should be "yes" --- the newly sighted can correctly associate the shapes.

A sufficiently educated and intelligent person with congenital blindness would be able to correctly differentiate the shapes. Say, for instance, had Locke been born blind and still educated as rigorously. Of the many deductions that could be performed, the motion of the head with eyes fixed looking around the border of an object in space approximates the motion of the hand tracing the same object. Many other deductions are possible. All you need are reasonable assumptions about the acclimatization process, e.g., the patient can have a suitable amount of time to adjust to being sighted but cannot touch anything during the process.

It is fascinating to think about the idea of disconnected senses, but as so commonly happens, fascination with an idea leads to sloppy thinking, especially among the educated.

The reason why the empirical studies of the patients from India are wrong, despite being interpreted as giving a concurring answer, is that the blind have traditionally been given feeble educations, lacking in the type of rigorous thinking necessary to solve the problem. Historically it was challenging to teach abstract reasoning to the blind, and for this reason many were not taught. See Herzog's documentary "Handicapped Future" for tragic examples in relatively wealthy 1960s West Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicapped_Future

The five patients in India who could not afford simple but life-altering surgery were sure to be poor in addition to being blind, and so surely must have received awful educations. Compounding this are their young ages.

A sufficiently motivated, newly-sighted Locke would've gotten the answer correct.

All within reason. We're not going to try to be a silo, if that's what you mean. We want to be as interoperable with other applications as possible.

We'll be launching Dropbox support soon. Hope you'll come back to us then.

You can bring up the delete button for a sheet by right swiping the sheet's cell after tapping on the project breadcrumb. This sounds clumsy written out. Inside the app the gesture should be natural.

Multiple cell selection isn't implemented in 1.0. We had to be choosy about what feature we supported in 1.0, as there are a lot of spreadsheet features people want. Specifying the cells in the formula by typing them out does work, however.

The crashes we'll fix. Thanks for the kind words, we'll keep at it.

You can hook up a keyboard to your iPad, if you like. Not sure if that would solve your problem. Keyboard support is on our planned list of features. Most iPad users are fine with the touch screen keyboard, so we haven't prioritized physical keyboard support yet.

Version 1.1 should import/export Excel sheets. Version 1.0 doesn't import/export so that we could launch quicker and make sure everything is stable.

Import/export is coming. Probably in the next release.

One common problem with spreadsheets is the "spreadsheet-as-a-database" anti-pattern. People try to use their spreadsheets as databases when the spreadsheet really isn't prepared for that. Permanent solves this problem by using a column-oriented backing store, with no additional burden placed on the user. You can enter data into your spreadsheets in whichever way suits you, and then run scripts against a real column-oriented data store. Permanent is pretty fast already without any special optimizations. Most queries we've tried run faster on Permanent on the iPad than on Excel on the desktop. You can put millions of rows on your iPad no problem. We haven't spent too much time optimizing for these high-performance cases yet, so there's maybe 10x worth of improvements still available.

Any dev who can write Java can write Objective-C, and there would be real benefit in switching.

> for all but a handful of companies like Google and Facebook

I think this is a mischaracterization. A lot of companies need something at Java's strength or above on the backend. It is a common problem. And organizations with those needs will account for the majority of web traffic.

> heavy number crunching

Also a mischaracterization. Even simple tasks become computationally challenging when you're doing them for a large audience.

Apple's track record on the web has been poor. Their websites are not first class. So they could have to build expertise there. I think, for backend services, networking expertise on the OS teams would go a long way.

In terms of staffing and responsibility, I don't see that as an issue, since if this does make sense for Apple, Apple is large enough that handling the workload wouldn't be a problem.

A good point. Coming from the iOS side I missed this. I mentioned Xcode's garbage collection in passing, but pointing out that garbage collection is deprecated on OS X would've made a strong argument that ARC is the better way to do things.

> Windows devs are never going to use Obj-C for their web development

In the second half of the note there's a point about nearly 100% of web developers at major web companies using Macs. I'm not sure what percent of the web runs Windows (or was developed on Windows). The only major sites I know of that run Windows are the StackOverflow sites. Of course, that doesn't rule out Windows powering some reasonable percentage (including corporate backends), which I'm sure it does. It's just evidence that Windows isn't the pace setter.

> Ruby/Python/PHP/Java

PHP simply doesn't work for long-running processes. Java and Java-like languages tend to replace Ruby and Python for long-running processes on large sites, and that's the target here.

At one point Java was something Sun had to push to get people to use.

> I think if you solve this, you've implemented GC.

Not necessarily. There are lots of ways around this that don't involve garbage collection. There I was thinking specifically about static analysis suggesting Objective-C weak pointers in some cases. There are also runtime techniques (including assignment-time checking), memory profiler techniques, and the potential for simple new techniques that could make this discussion shorter. (This assumes you aren't classifying reference counting as a "garbage collection" method, which is sometimes done.) In any case, you are still in a better position than in a garbage collected language.

But that is a long discussion about garbage collection, and it is getting far afield from the subject, which is why the note doesn't go into it further. The main point is that how you handle reference cycles doesn't matter.

Let's see what they're fighting about. From Boaler's complaint:

"[...] research evidence that could be used to improve the mathematics achievement of students in the United States and beyond [...]"

From her critics' paper (Bishop, Clopton, Milgram):

"This study makes extremely strong claims for discovery style instruction in mathematics, and consequently has the potential to affect instruction and curriculum throughout the country."

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/combined-evaluations-version3.pdf

Both sides agree that a positive research result has the potential to alter mathematics education in the country. Then the question is: what's true, that Boaler has found a way to substantially improve education, or that her analysis is flawed?

If he was not misled by the false "on hover" representation of the link in his address bar, then its possible he means:

1. That Twitter uses a "short link" where Google uses some kind of (I trust) token-secured "open redirect"

or

2. That Google uses a {Javascript, 301, ...} redirect where Twitter uses a {Javascript, 301, ...} redirect.

Depending on what User-agent I sent, I got Twitter to variously return a Javascript or 301 Moved Permanently response. I could only get Google to return a Javascript response to cURL, but I did not try hard, and I would not rule out Google employing different redirect methods, particularly on their search results page. Google is notorious for falling back to different methods depending on the particulars of the client. See:

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-forcing...

So they at least both use the Javascript method. In any event, if you mod out the content of the hyperlink after the domain, and mod out the content of the text based HTTP response (!), which is fair here, then the methods are all equivalent, and all generate the same server diagrams.

In this case, there is not much difference between the browser parsing plaintext in HTTP headers that tells it to go to a different site and the browser parsing plaintext in an HTTP body that tells it to go to a different site once executed in a Javascript engine.

Redirects of all types are especially bad on mobile devices since they require a pointless new round trip, which anecdotally seems to double the amount of time it takes for a webpage to start loading.

Since Facebook and many other services do this on their mobile apps by default, I am surprised I don't hear more complaints about it. Twice through the cell tower is too long.

Twitter wants to route links through their servers for at least two reasons:

  1. Analytics and monitoring. (Google's results page uses the same technique.)
  2. Disabling malicious and unwanted links.

Ken Perlin has done some interesting work on the subject: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/demox/Planet.html

It is a render of a randomly-seeded "Earth" that supports zooming. You can zoom in continuously to recursively expanding island formations. The formations are not random, in the sense that they are not decided on the fly. They are fixed based on the original seed and will stay the same if you come back to the same location. So the trick resembles displaying a map that takes up a huge amount of memory, even though that isn't really the case. As I recall the limits of the zoom have something to do with the width of floating point.

Apologies to Ken if I inaccurately described his demo. He usually makes the source available for download but I don't see how to get it here.

This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.)

Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni.

Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia.

At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately.

Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.

It's a curious line, and while when I read it I let it pass with conditional assent, I now think it's incorrect.

Wall Street has poorer-than-usual ethics, and does commit crimes for profit, but in general it is wary of the legal system. Wall Street tends not to exploit opportunities that run afoul of the legal system, even when they are risk-adjusted comparable to other opportunities. They would rather make money legally than illegally, if they can help it.

To use the wording of the article, Goldman Sachs (Wall Street) typically does not commit crimes when "the potential revenue from the crime [is] greater than the probability adjusted weight of getting caught", even if you set the adjusted revenue to average profitability.

In particular, Goldman Sachs (Wall Street) is gunshy with respect to the US legal system. From a charitable standpoint, perhaps this is out of an ethical respect for the law. From a cynical standpoint, perhaps there is another more involved risk calculation which takes into account long-term reputation and the unpredictability of political administrations and legal settlements. Given a long enough outlook cynical self-interest approaches ethics.

You seem to be evaluating this company based on either A. how it would work for you personally, as someone who isn't interested or B. an inaccurate assessment of how it would work for other people who aren't you. When discussing a company you typically try to avoid both.

For instance, many girls like dolls, but if you don't like dolls that doesn't make dolls a "No." business, and it's not illuminating to hear why dolls are icky. A better discussion would be how and what makes a new doll appealing (or unappealing) and whether it can compete with Barbie.

Clearly the online survey industry is making some money. Certain parts of the web, which may not target you, rely on surveys. Combining surveys and paywalls, if not perfectly novel, is at least interesting. The combination raises a host of issues and potential problems which your comment ignores.

Your being off-base would not quite matter as much if it wasn't so rude to the team that worked on this. Did they do a good job in their implementation? I don't know, it hasn't come up yet.

> The concept of a 'front lawn', or even of easy access to nature in general, has not always been as popular as it is today.

The divide between city and country living is ancient. I find most of your assertions based on Jackson hard to swallow. We were almost exclusively agrarian before industrialization. Your article gives the fraction of people living in cities as 1/3 in 1890 in the US. It's more than that today. It seems like lawns and easy access to nature have been around for a long time. If they are more in demand today, maybe it's because there is a natural need that's going unfilled.

(If anyone has a good chart of US city vs. non-city dwelling over time, please share.)

> As Jackson notes, a front lawn is rather useless except as a status symbol

A status symbol? Only if you are looking at it from the perspective of an apartment dweller. Suburban neighborhoods don't think of people in terms of their front yard. They don't think of front yards much at all, except when it comes time to cut them.

If your front yard is messy, that might reflect badly on you, but that sort of information will be conveyed in other ways. The front yard won't have much to do with it.

I suppose a more accurate way to phrase your argument would be "ornamentation". Even then, a front yard is not useless. People like to have space between them and their neighbors. It is a buffer between you and the road, and a place for your children to play. People like to have a space that's theirs.

I think it is much more likely that the size of yards is a function of what people find comfortable to have between them and their neighbors, with other factors like cost coming into play second.

Why, for instance, do New Yorkers buy their second homes in the surrounding rural areas? Why not another apartment?

When I lived in the city I felt cramped. Apartment living taxed my well-being. It's possible this is because of how I grew up. I think it's more likely it's a physical attribute of how I am. Suburbanites are probably the same way.

Open up Google Earth and pan over America. Are you suggesting all the front yards you see are equivalent to gold chains, and not some fundamental property of how people want to live?

> and they can cut the amount of available space in a neighborhood by 50% or more, making them a truly luxury expense.

Again, this could only come from a city perspective. Front yards are easy to get. Everyone who wants one has one. The objective function of a suburban area is not to maximize space efficiency.

By the end of your comment you steer the discussion back towards cities in particular---but Jackson is an argument on actual suburbanization, not "intra-city" suburbanization. So if you aren't talking about these concepts in general, why predicate your comment on Jackson's book/phenomenon?

We have some of the same thoughts on the matter. There was a thread on invention and marketing that I had to drop. Treating the marketing aspect properly takes the conversation too far away from the main subject. Points like who invented what first are too hot to introduce without spending a lot of time accounting for them. (That surprised me.) The same goes for who can be considered an inventor today.

I think invention and marketing have an old and deep connection.

"Tweet" is such a good replacement for "asynchronously broadcast" that it won't matter whether Twitter is still around. The meaning is clear from context. It would not surprise me if "tweet" became a reserved word in computer science research.