Indeed, seems like a single cloud.call will not give you any parallelism, you need many calls. So the whole parallelization challenge is left completely up to you. Still, this is a nice approach, and I'd like to see more companies in this space.
Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life. Why is this so is an important question and the answers will, sadly, often point to discrimination. But none of it has anything to do with Sillicon Valley.
I really like the trick of determining the identities of 3 gods with just two yes/no questions. Simple, just ask questions that might make their heads explode. :)
You have only 3 questions. If you formulate a hypothesis like "A is True, B is False and C is Random", with a naive approach you will waste much more than 3 questions just to test this single hypothesis (and statistically, it will be false, so you will need to test more).
This is a well-written story, and one that has been experienced by many people I know, often with less happy ending.
Unfortunately, it is more of a general statement about the problems of the immigration system, rather than providing support for the Startup Visa proposal. The proposal, while a great idea in theory, is mostly useless in practice, since it requires $0.5 million in VC funding up-front - an investment that would be more typical for a company that is already about 1-2 years old.
Indeed, the proposed terms are extremely strict and I would not expect more than a dozen companies a year to pass them.
It is hard to imagine a scenario where it could be used other than an already successful company from abroad willing to relocate to the US by pitching their already viable product to US VCs (by coming here on a tourist visa).
Malthusianism is fundamentally correct - if population increases exponentially, the point at which we don't physically fit on the Earth (let alone feed ourselves) is only a constant number of years away.
Of course, (almost) no one believes this will actually happen. Instead, it will be either contraception or war/famine/disease that will end the growth. There are no other possibilities, so let's hope it is the first of the two. :)
Yes, you're right, they're not "ancient" in any meaningful way. However, studying long isolated languages is still interesting, since whatever similaraties can still be discerned between (say) Indo-European and Andamanese languages were presumably present in the common ancestor of these languages, which probably existed more than 60k years ago. Thus by studying an isolated language, we might learn something about an ancient language.
Yes, #10 is a bit offensive, implying that he is in the top but you probably aren't. Also, it is rather unlikely that you can attain a huge productivity edge over others in everyday tasks like "take an old buggy codebase and add a simple feature here and there". This might work in more research-oriented programming, where some can create things that others didn't even think possible; but I don't think that's what he means.
I think there was a lot of excitement about XML databases around that time, because they would let you store more complex structures in the DB, not less complex (like key-value). Somehow XML did not take off, not sure why.
It seems like, to have associativity in the sense of
"(a+b)+c = a+(b+c)", you'd have to extend << to also become the string concatenation operator in C++. There are quite a few rules that need to hold to make it work...
It doesn't seem possible to consistently make "1 < 2 < 3" a syntax error in a language powerful enough to redefine <. (Including Haskell, where you could easily hide the Prelude definition and define your own, also changing the fixity declaration.)
So I guess a fair compromise would be if the default implementation rejects "1 < 2 < 3" at either compile-time or run-time, whichever is possible.
Hmmm... but by the same argument, Ruby is also doing it right, by correctly crashing at runtime (there is no way for a language without a type-system and with redefinable operators to discover the error at compile time).
Somehow the author isn't clear on whether he wants "1 < 2 < 3" to return true or to be rejected; if it's the latter, then most languages get it right (except Python and Matlab, as far as I know).
There is a program called pdflrf that does this, and it is far from ideal, since most two-column papers have figures that span both columns. Another tool called PaperCrop does this right, but unfortunately only produces images as output; I have not yet figured out how to reliably join them into e-book format. The non-existence of a good tool to solve this problem is quite annoying...
My point was indeed that performance can matter, and will matter even more in the future, since no apparent technological limit on network speed has been reached so far.
The reason why dynamic scripting languages are more appropriate for web applications than C++ is simply that the bottleneck is somewhere else - namely, the Internet is slow enough to make the performance of the server-side code irrelevant. That can very easily change in the future.
What about when you come up with a buggy algorithm? Did you do a bad job at inventing an algorithm, or a great job at discovering a wonderful, previously unknown (though incorrect) one? :)
Motion blur really is the reason film gets away with smaller framerates. A movie played on a computer's LCD screen (not interlaced) at 24fps simply doesn't look as choppy as a game at 24 fps on the same same screen. This is also the reason CG movies (e.g. Pixar) use motion blur.
Here the question is more like - what makes a teenage boy fall into the top 50% or bottom 50% of popularity? The guys in the top 50% most likely did not get there by extreme attention to detail or by wearing expensive accessories.
Why is it that nerdy kids often fall into the bottom 50% despite their clothes not being substantially different from others is an interesting question that has not been conclusively answered. If it is because they are short, weak and have unattractive faces, then what in the world causes the correlation with IQ?
They have a player that you need to download. I did, ready to be blown away by recent advances in Turing test bots, but seems like we're still decades away from a program that could possibly pass the test.
Why does knowing it make you worse off? If you're a man, you're better off knowing it, because confidence can be increased by practice. If you're a woman, you're also better off, because you can better distinguish confidence from real skill in men.
> it doesn't seem too extreme to expect similar support for Larrabee
You have a point, but I think the reason NVIDIA doesn't open-source the drivers is the same as the reason Larrabee probably wouldn't open-source them - i.e. fear of releasing the details of the GPU design to the competition. Current Intel's graphics has nothing to hide from NVIDIA, but Lrrabee would. But of course, this is just speculation, especially now that no consumer Larrabee is on the horizon...
Not sure what you mean, NVIDIA hardware works great on Linux and I use it on a daily basis.
Are you referring to the fact that NVIDIA's drivers aren't open-source? Well, there is no reason to expect that Larrabee's would have been.
In any case, there is probably nothing interesting in the driver source code anyway. (A lot of "copy this buffer of instructions to the GPU, this buffer back" and not much else.)
OK, some of these are really meant for technical users (hosting solutions, bug trackers, automated testing tools) but are the companies selling them actually doing badly because of oversupply? Or comparably worse to companies addressing the general public?
Well, that depends on the job... but indeed, the interviews most likely to ask these questions are exactly for the more pragmatic jobs. No university will ask prospective professors these things; instead, they will ask about what research they did in the past and what is their vision for future research.
Yeah, I agree it measures preparedness more than skill.
Also, there is a difference between a great physicist with a playful mind asking those questions, and some nameless, annoyed interviewer whose only authority to ask such questions comes from the fact that he already has the job...
In other words, these riddles can be used to encourage creativity when used right. But they can also be used to put down the candidate no matter what the answer (what, you would put the expensive Boeing in water??? you must be crazy!).
Oh, Haskell is also not used very often for those things. It's just my (outsider) perception that Lisp programmers frequently pick on C/C++ as inferior. Haskell programmers instead ask "what can we do to make Haskell performance closer to C/C++?"
However, I am doing graphics for a living, and much of it in C++. I am sincerely interested if I can use another language to give me a higher degree of productivity and not sacrifice too much performance. Common Lisp might be able to pull this off, but it certainly is not often used in this way.
I think you'd agree it's more common for a Lisp person to ask "why do people still use these inferior languages?" rather than "how can we match the performance/scalability/parallelism of these other languages?".