mdda

Just like when a startup bases their existence on (say) the Facebook API, becoming part of Microsoft's ecosystem has a lot of benefits : But there are significant downside risks.

I think it's already telling that you're interested in Django, Rails and Vim. AFAIK, they're all built by *NIX people (even if they're using MacBooks), and treat supporting the Windows platform as a necessary evil.

From my point of view, it's better to be on the side of contributing to a global software ecosystem, rather than one owned by a specific company.

That seems like something that should be on the website...

IMO, this is a great deck for IBM (better than many of the tech presentations by companies pitching for enterprise business):

(a) Showing interesting non-proprietary technology, which everyone can play with;

(b) Well thought out demos, which even point out limitations, and work-arounds (xyz views for the game);

(c) the 'IBM takeaway' that actually points out the corporate use-cases obliquely, without ramming that pitch into everyone's face at the start.

It's unclear how the 'wait multiple cycles' is such a deal-breaker. Even when using a GPU (in the standard way) there are cycles that get used in processing the different stages of a computation. But, more significantly, the Spiking Neuron thing doesn't (necessarily) have to work at a low clock rate, or any clock rate, since the same integration-through-time approach could even work asynchronously, or with jitter, etc. It's a pretty robust & low-power design (and evolution found it, who would have guessed?)

But over a specific time-period, doesn't spike-and-fire integrate signals, so that effectively you're operating with real-valued quantities? Isn't this the brain's way of using digital signals (more robust, lower power) than analogue values over the neural wires?

For the control input via UART are you connecting a USB->UART interface to the phone, and then talking MAVlink to the ArduPilot (essentially like [1])? Or are you going lower level and talking multichannel RC control signals, which would then interface to even dumber PID loop-only kind of controllers (eg: KK)?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31ULjsqjiYs

At the recent show in Asia, Nvidia was keen to promote the video input side of these smaller GPU chips - with particular reference to self-driving cars. In their vision, each car is going to need approx. 8 cameras, and each of these is going to require dedicated 3D-analysis on the video in real time (object localization, identification, etc). (#cars * 8) makes #GamerPCs look small...

192 cores is right. It's now Nvidia's smallest 'slab', with the workstation/server class chips having multiples of that.

But isn't being seen as an Apple 'clone' a huge win for the company? In China, Xiaomi is distinguishing themselves from their competitors by being consistently associated in the same sentence as Apple, whereas the others are 'just Android'. It would be a PR coup for Xiaomi to be actually sued by Apple : They'd be constantly in the news as being seen as comparable to the most prestigious brand available. Xiaomi doesn't mind the controversy : It all reinforces the idea that their brand is in Apple's style-bracket.

With due respect, "I had to turn on my VPN to read this article and post this comment" is overstating. I understand that you may feel like you should only read/post with the aid of a VPN : However, having lived in the US for quite a while before arriving in SG, I think you're overestimating the reality of American's Freedom of Speech (for non-US persons). Both of us are foreign nationals w.r.t. the USA NSA. So they're legally free (under US law, as I understand it) to monitor, store and correlate all our communications (particularly since we're meeting at an end-point in the USA).

You're overstating : I'm sitting in Holland Village (Singapore) reading HN just fine.

Another benefit of flipping a coin is that if, after the choice is made (e.g. the coin comes up heads), you instinctively regret it not having been tails : then you know what you wanted in your heart. Since your brain had no better answer than to flip a coin, then this is a quick and rationalizable way to see what your heart feels.

Except for medical technology : without it, the cave-man would have far fewer years of expected life-span to enjoy sitting by the fire with his family. And many of those years would be filled with ill-health, etc.

But once the Engineering component has been hammered down as much as server costs were in the previous generation ('Sun pizza boxes with Oracle' turned into AWS on OSS), what's the next largest expense line?

If the next most expensive thing is the marketing spend, so that the company gets the required exposure in overcrowded app stores (for example), then the VCs are painting themselves into a Hollywood hit role - at best.

Yes to the more reasonable px/performance of a desktop/server Linux backend for HPC. OTOH, if you were doing OpenCL instead of CUDA, the i5 would happily run that as an OpenCL target (albeit more slowly), so that you could do compilation/test dev on any newish laptop.

This was a surprisingly relevant story for me - I'm just decompressing after a "Marine Hackathon" held over the weekend in Singapore [1]. It was an all-too-brief glimpse into the vast container transshipment business, and the operations of the enormous port here : The quantities of goods that flow through the port is amazing [2]. i.e. more than 1 20 foot container per second 24/7/365.

[1] : http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-hackathon/ [2] : http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-hand...

Where did the footnotes go?

I've heard that often in 'blind' peer reviews, the feedback will often be : "Paper would be improved by including reference to the work of XYZ" - essentially creating additional citations for author XYZ (who may, coincidentally, be the reviewing peer, and may feel that getting additional citations for their own work is the payment they require for doing the review work).

If you read the sentence you quoted, you'll see that you agree with it : It says that Democratic elites (even those that are more concerned with social and cultural issues) don't really care about an issue until it affects their own children. Assuming the elites aren't poor, then the poor (by that stage) have already gone by the way-side.

Another anecdote : The Kick-Off GoLang Meetup was held in Singapore last night. There was a large Chinese contingent in comparison to other meetups (turnout 20-30, majority Chinese. SingaporeJS turnout 100-150, much more mixed crowd : Where mixed in SG programming seems to usually imply a large number/majority of Western ex-pats).

The main speaker was the developer behind Beego (https://github.com/astaxie), who showed slides that included usage at Chinese companies, etc). Apparently there are quite a few Chinese on-line gaming companies testing the limits of the language (particularly GC-wise).

Here's an "elementary" proof :

If n is prime>3 then it's definitely odd.

n^2-1 = (n+1).(n-1)

But n is odd, so (n+1) and (n-1) are both even. So overall, we have a factor of 4.

But, since one of those two is 2 different from the other, it must also be divisible by 4.

Now, looking at this sideways too, we also have a run of 3 numbers {(n-1), n, (n+1)}. So one of them must be divisible by 3. But n isn't (since it's prime). Therefore at least one of the other two is.

So,overall, we have 2.4.3 as a minimum set of factors...

Maybe the VIC-20 was quirky, but the Pet used PEEKs and POKEs. Oh, the memories (32Kb fully loaded)

As a guess, this paper is appearing here not only because it's cool, but also the "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" course (by Martin Odersky) has just re-started on Coursera.

He mentioned GPU-related DSLs in his OSCON Java 2011 keynote (see : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jg1AheF4n0 at ~14m20s) which was one of the listed 'Learning Resources'. However, the Stanford group he was involved in was doing 'Liszt' and this is 'Singe' (and his name isn't in the paper) - so I'm wondering if there isn't some kind of internal race going on...

It takes me back too... In 1990(?) I worked as a summer intern in the Cambridge UK offices of Perihelion, who were the UK designers/distributors (or something) for the Atari Transputer Workstation. We (the interns) spent the summer building cool demos of the hardware for a show in the Autumn.

Shortly thereafter (possibly due to some other medical devices project overrunning badly), the company went under, and one of the other interns and I bought the contents of the building at auction in April/May.

We were fortunate enough to know that "Box 7 : Electronics" happened to contain a bunch of T800s. So we spent the next summer cold-calling Perihelion's customer list ('Box 27 : Papers') and giving people some great deals. Those were the days...

Perhaps you should over-write them with garbage before doing this. Simply deallocating them (or assigning them to new objects) could leave them hanging around in memory until something else overwrites the same memory space.

I completely agree : But many people (including, possibly the original creator) would feel differently if (a) they chose not to take the advice, and everything remains the same ("I don't need that money"); and (b) someone else took all that surplus instead ("How dare they steal from me!"). Either way, the original creator's bottom-line is the same (probably higher in case (b) due to volume).

Another possibility would be for there to be an 'authorized' premium B2B version - where the original author gets a certain X% ownership, and the slick-marketing type does all the fluff/flashy stuff that adds value for that set of customers.

Or (to play devil's advocate) for someone else to start a slick B2B brand that used tarsnap as a backend, and took all the surplus out of the middle...

I understand that wealthy people may be conspicuously buying Mercedes and Lamborghinis : But that doesn't change the facts about the MRT, busses and Taxis...

Agreed, it doesn't boost the morale of the general population to see, but it also really doesn't make living in Singapore significantly worse (particularly since the absolute numbers are pretty small, even if it's a popular/populist talking point).

You've got to be kidding if you're complaining about taxes in Singapore... OTOH, there's a lot of complaining going on in Singapore : It's a national sport (more akin to the UK, IHMO, than the US).

The car ownership stuff is a conscious decision on the part of the government to avoid problems that plague so many cities.

FWIW, I lived in NYC for over a decade, moving to Singapore last September (2013). NYC is definitely more expensive.

To emphasize the point : In Singapore, the MRT (subway) and bus systems are excellent & frequent (and you can get exact ETA info via your phone). Taxis are everywhere and cheap. There's even less reason to own a car in Singapore than in NYC.