I think the most interesting thing about this article was how they handled ads/micropayments. It detected my ad blocker and asked, "Hey, we see you have an ad blocker, disable your ad blocker or each article is 10c, we'll spot you a dollar, are you cool with that?" Yes, yes I am. That's totally reasonable.
Reproducibility is a big problem in analytic pipelines, specifically genomics. Researchers tend tweak their tools here and there and it has always been quite difficult to "package" a pipeline. Docker makes that much easier. We've seen a huge movement in the containerization of genomics pipelines, the results of which (we hope) help cure serious disease. In my world, we're using Docker every day to try and find cures for pediatric brain cancer. It's obviously not our only tool, but it helps.
> As builders of web systems, we need to be conscious of which 3rd parties are gaining access to private user data. There's no reason in hell any Google or Facebook widget should be embedded in my health care providers website, yet somehow that's a thing. Any other website is usually even worse.
I find a lot of value in federated login through Google and Facebook. I'd rather have the hardest parts of authentication handled by their services than relying on thousands of different developers rolling their own solutions with varying levels of sanity.
Snapchat is not a Facebook property. Nor do I think Apple has resources allocated to review a library used by any app to facilitate if queries on the ntppool are kosher.
The implication is that people will travel to North Carolina from South Carolina to buy their computers instead of having to buy the "filtered" ones in their home state.
I think the printing industry is just inherently difficult to serve. Manufacturers can barely deliver quality products and support on the printers they make now. I can't imagine them also having to support all of these "custom" setups. I imagine a future where these custom printers you describe might exist, but in a centralized "kinkos" type store, or better yet a makerspace. There's a big difference marketing and selling to a consumer vs. specialized industry.
As I toil away on a node based project that is interfacing with Samsung's Artik platform (both the Artik 10 board and Artik Cloud) I finally decided to call it a night -- check HN real quick -- and discover that Samsung is buying the original stewards of node. I almost thought the lack of sleep was putting me into psychosis...
I'm not sure you can compare Snapchat to Toyota, though. Perhaps Snapchats strategy is the right one? I could imagine small groups of engineers working on small self-driven features being more effective then the "lets sit down and plan this out with gantt charts and focus groups" approach. Specifically for a company like snapchat serendipitous feature creation is valuable even when so much work is being "thrown away".