kulkarnic

Well, from the past few months of use:

* C# (and possibly others) compile faster * Startup slower than VS 9 (marginal) * Human perf is higher due to better auto-complete etc

Bottomline, if you're happy with VS 9 on your machine (you don't find it too slow), VS 10 is going to be similar.

I'm surprised noone brought this up, but this has been done (several times) before: the one I remember is called DateLens by Bederson et al at UMD (See http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972652&dl=GUIDE...)

It's interesting how similar ideas keep coming up every so often.

Similar effects have been seen for non-dollar figures: people anchor to numbers on Wheel of Fortune, for instance (Kahneman's 1974 paper).

However, this anchoring is definitely weaker, so your point is taken.

Here you go: http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/3/3509/Papers/Ariely.pdf

Btw, note that initial anchors grossly affect the decision; subsequent anchors are less effective. So, if the interviewer already has a figure in mind (or worse, has written it down), then you really have a lower chance of swaying the number. "making a fairly strong suggestion" may not move the anchor much.

However, if neither knows a reasonable number, then any anchoring is significant (including numbers not pre-pended with a dollar sign- Kahnenann's 1974 paper).

Because most people want to look reasonable at a job interview.

However, one thing people miss is that the anchoring can be to any number whatsoever, so you don't even need to talk about what you want per hour. I remember a paper that asked participants to note down the last two digits of their social security, and subjects anchored themselves to that (statistically significantly- one of the authors was Dan Ariely).

So, at the job interview, I am guessing just saying "You know, at my previous company, they had 98,000 employees" could anchor the interviewer to that number. Of course, this anchoring would be weaker than "$1M", but you could cut out the embarrassment bit.

Yeah, you're right. Streams are tricky- music and network too. I think Android solves it using services; would be interesting if Apple comes up with something different (I don't like daemons on my phone personally; but maybe it doesn't matter to most people.)

To a consumer, having interleaved tasks might appear like multi-tasking while it technically isn't (which you point out).

Well, not everyone agrees on the definition of multi-tasking. As a consumer, interleaving of processes seems quite adequate to me (i.e. no apps running in the background; apps are suspended on minimize), but an app developer may not agree.

I suspect that multitasking support, if introduced will be of the interleaved type- Apple's stance on true background apps being battery killers seems sensible to me.

But then, you never know: with the newer iPad style batteries, they might even pull it off! (I still doubt it, though, since that sort of OS update won't work on older iPhones)

I wonder if people are missing the bigger point here- this isn't just about selling your car, it's about understanding your real needs and living within them.

Few people have the courage to do this. Fewer still will resist going back to their old over-indulgent ways (spring water et al) once times are good again.

I'm actually quite tired of people telling other people how to be successful. First, it's quite a vain goal.

Second, and more importantly, consciously knowing what actions lead to success/failure does not translate into one taking/avoiding those actions (e.g. most people understand that flattery may be insincere, yet many people fall prey to it. Nearly everyone know about honesty being the "best policy", and yet humans across the centuries have deceived (and have been caught)).

What would be more useful would be a "n ways to always practice what your mom told you". Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is a great start in the direction, but I doubt we'll ever find all the hacks to cure our innate stupidity.

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.

I'm somewhat familiar with the research models afforded by both companies, and have a slightly different view.

Research at IBM is mostly product-group driven. Microsoft affords more flexibility- allowing more academic research, for example. This puts them farther into the future, IMO, than solving immediate product research needs. What I meant by investment above is more than monetary- it takes a lot to get a good research team going.

I agree that nothing can save a company with shut eyes. A strong research group is a way to keep them open.

Not really. If you were following the company in the 90s, two quick examples are Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4 (Remember when IE was actually _praised_ for better standards-compliance and developer-features?)

As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on:

1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.

2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.

Yes, I got somewhat emotional(?) too. It was a birthplace of so many great ideas-- Java being the least of them. I personally feel "The network is the computer" was one of the most important ideas of the last century (the other being "a computer on every desk"), and one that Google and others are capitalizing on today.

It's really sad to see such a company dissolve away.

Oh, it is called "Sequel Server" within Microsoft, but Wikipedia says "S-Q-L" for the language. Strange... I remember it saying "sequel" some time ago. Is the received pronunciation now C-O-B-O-L too?

Wellll.... I don't know if it's meaty at all. Nothing in there actually is revealing: yeah, they do eye-tracking. So does every serious outfit. They store all the data they create: yes, it's nearly free to do that (relatively speaking), and I'd be surprised if they didn't do it (nearly all graph algorithms they should employ will benefit from more data to train/test); they're creating Hyper-PHP--great etc, but you'd really think twice before creating your own site on PHP, so it's a non-issue for me at least.

Bonus: I'm also certain they have their own front-end engineering which is speeding up javascript. Nearly everyone else does, and getting that 0.5s page-load will certainly need this boost.

That was my precise first thought. But he's really talking of a scripting language in general: think Javascript (browser)or Perl (computer).

Since the discussion before this line was about PHP, I think it tends to trip you up.

Somehow, this reminds me of an Asimov tale. A planet called Solaria, in fact:

The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds. Solarian robots were noted for their variety and excellence. They also exported their grain, which was used to make a delicacy known as the pachinka.-- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

No offense to the Japanese of course; all I'm saying is fiction is often an extrapolation of stuff all around us.

Not true in India either (and from what I know) in a lot of countries based on the English Common Law.

Actually, this is Photosynth (rather both use th same base tech.) In fact, city-wide synthing has been possible for some time now- the crux is matching up the photos fast enough, which has now been reduced to a day (for 1M photos). For the interested, fast (real-time) matching of video streams was also demoed at TechFest some year or so ago. I'm pretty sure there's a video about it somewhere, possibly at TechCrunch.

I don't know: HN is rapidly replacing my feed reader; and I think the news is interesting in its own right (may not have anything to do with "hacking", but still).

And if you are using a JIT that optimizes frequent code; how easily the branches are predictable and a host of other factors. Also, I don't think this comparison is even useful: clearly if-else and switch-case have different use-cases.

Some others have also hinted at using an array of function pointers and indexing by switch variable. This looks cleaner, but is not necessarily faster, since each call then involves chasing down a memory-pointer (this is also the general argument against virtual functions).

I'm not sure how valid this C-argument is in Java world, but I believe pointer chasing is a major performance problem (C# requires an explicit virtual declaration on functions for the same reason).

Well, I actually meant bloated as a framework. Too much magic, too many APIs and too many ways to do the same thing.

Actually, I don't know if it is true, but I wasn't happy with Rails the last time around, and I want to learn something different.

What a silly headline! It's annoying enough that Techcrunch posts its own misinformed analogy on the Google outage (really, packets were only rerouted: there's no way you'd end up in Hong Kong instead of SF; the journey would just last a little longer), but worse that it makes an attempt to sensationalize by blaming an entire continent.

I wonder why Techcrunch doesn't stick to its "expertise": finding and reviewing worthy new startups and applications.

Perhaps we could have a filter that detects if a particular user consistently submits links from a particular domain only. I wonder if it'll work (maybe it targets too uncommon a special-case).

Really, we do need a way to custom-query news.yc so we can see the effects of prototype filters. Any way to do it already in existence?

Trying this now, thanks!

Very very interesting :)

I actually don't use SQL for querying anything (as I said, I'm more looking for seeing how much values deviate from the mean etc), but this looks cool.

One question in relation to your project is why not simply use awk, filter data, pipe to a sqlite db and then query with "real" SQL? I'm curious to know why you choose to write a parser for SQL rather than a lint-thing for CSV..