vph

Sign. This is why we can't have good things.

> The dependency on Google had started to annoy me.

Either Chrome or Firefox or something else. Choose your poison. One's life has to be depended on something.

It's not the language of choice for introducing CS to college students at all. The author should do some research first before making such a statement. No sensible CS departments would do something like this. For some reason, I see many "web" people think that web development is the center of Computer Science. It is not. Web dev is not even a required course for many CS undergrad programs.

Products like this do not have the burden of a trailblazer like the Chromecast. When the Chromecast was introduced, they must explain elaborately what it does. For this Amazon product, simply saying "4x storage 2x memory more than Chromecast" is sufficient in explaining what it does. People immediately know that it does what the Chromecast does. There's no confusion about that. Furthermore, it's also implying that it's better than the Chromecast. So, while that first line didn't entertain you, for many people, it says and implies a lot.

>Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information.

Yes. It's about social networks, not Facebook in particular. The alternative is choosing not to participate. This is an intrinsic problem. You participate in a social network; you choose to be connected; you learn more about people and things in general, and as a result, people learn more about you. With technologies, there've always been trade-offs.

The reason that Yosemite/Mavericks stall for a long time (although they inform users wrongly that there would be few minutes left, causing panic) is due to the copying and moving things in /usr/local/. If you have a huge /usr/local, it will take hours. Chances are you will need to remove /usr/local/Cellars and reinstall home-brew anyway. So, removing it first will save you some time.

protip: delete /usr/local/Cellars and posibbly LiveTex before upgrade OSX.

he proposed progressive tax on consumption. His argument makes sense.

If done properly, multimedia can convey information that text cannot possibly do. Text just lack the dimensions that multimedia have. An example includes the RSA Animate series, which take really good books written by really good authors and condensed that into very informative 5-minute videos.

I failed to understand this line of criticism. Open Source is a software development model. It's not a model of society and does not guarantee to consists of only well-mannered people. There are ugly, difficult people everywhere, not just in Open Source projects.

>As people, we do great things. We make babies laugh. We conquer mountains. We volunteer at soup kitchens. We do things that entertain, inspire, and comfort one another. In return, these things make us happy, awestruck, and loved

As people, we don't do great things. Some of us do great things. Some don't. Some conquer mountains. Some can't even run up a hilly street.

In other words, stop being politically correct, just be politically correct in the ways the author approves?

Well, there are several. I am not sure where to start. But I guess the most fundamental problem (to me) is this: at the core of the app are "implemented algorithms". Right? What is exactly "implemented algorithms"? They are just "software". The app is just ill-defined at its core. If you are selling software, then call it software.

Another thing is. Implemented algorithms are useless since they solve no real-world problems. For example, take an implementation of Dijkstra's shortest path. No real-world problem can directly use this implementation. It will have to be modified and adapted to a specific situation. This means customers will have to figure out somebody else's codes and modify it. Why don't they simply write it out themselves while consulting a classic algorithm textbook, instead of buying it?

I am predicting this thing will die a horrible death.

> Rumours have been circulating that the Chinese search engine is developing a bike that could drive itself through packed city streets.

I will believe it when I see it.

It's suspicious if it is not done frequently, and it is a sensitive location (e.g. a huge gas tank). Cops aren't stopping you if you take pictures of the Washington monument or the Statue of Liberty. But if something that doesn't happen normally happens, it's natural the the cops want to look into it.

Sure, the picture of the painted gas tank might be on the web, but a guy with a camera might be taking pictures of other sensitive things that are at the location, not just the painted gas tank.

I don't get the overreaction. If some stranger is walking around the neighborhood, doing something legal but suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary, a cop should have the right to stop him and ask questions. Cops should have the power to stop and ask questions when someone is doing something that is not normally done. Sure, he has the right to do things that are legal. But at the same time, cops should have the right to investigate. They weren't saying he did anything illegal.

[I am assuming there is not racial or religious profiling going on].

Not to defend Wolfram, but to understand this you'll have to understand that "The Wolfram Language" is not like the traditional "programming languages". Traditional programming languages consist of a set of grammar, essential built-in libraries and a few development tools. The Wolfram Language is more than that. It includes the Mathematica language, a very rich set of libraries/algorithms, rich bodies of knowledge encoded in curated datasets in various kinds of physical and social sciences.

It might be best to compare the Wolfram Language to natural languages like English instead of programming language. The English language is not just a set of grammar, but also a rich collection of vocabularies that need to be compiled and maintained, and perhaps a rich collection of literature that need to be maintained and expanded to help learners understand the language.

Wolfram spent quite some time and resources to collect data for his Wolfram Alpha, and his new "language". It makes sense to charge money for such efforts.

I completely disagree with this point of view. I often feel that many blog articles intentionally leave out dates because they want to feel "fresh" or they pretend that they came up with some great ideas first or they want the convenience/unaccountability of fixing mistakes in previous revisions. And that is a cheating. If your ideas are fresh and timeless, they will speak for themselves.

Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are timeless.

Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.

I hate blogs without dates. A good blog article is dated properly when it was created and revised. If you want to promote a new blog platform, better date your blogs properly.

A white guy, tall, decent looking, math professor, rock climber, guitarist. He didn't need to hack OKCupid to end up with an Asian girl of his dream.

The mathematics that programming -- program verification -- requires is unlike traditional mathematics. All programmers do this; all programmers will go through a process to reason why his programs are correct. This process might be formal or informal, conscious or subconscious, through or incomplete. The most relevant branch of mathematics would be formal logics.

Throughout the course of our lives, we have to make decisions based on "rules of thumbs". Cops have to make decisions based on "profiles" determined by such rules of thumbs based on statistics, experience and sometime hunches. Detective, investigative works have been based on profiling for ages. Call it data mining if you will. Clearly, if such profiling is based strictly & exclusively on race, then it is racist and perhaps stupid and ineffective as well. And the US history has witnessed a fair share of racial issues. Nevertheless, the content of this article appears to be race baiting, not honestly examining the issue of "stop and frisk".

>How'd I do?

You are wrong.

Surely, the color of skin is part of looks. How much is it? I don't know. But it is naive to say that skin color is the only thing.

The author hypothesis is that criminal profiling is based on race. A simpler hypothesis is that such profiling is based on looks. Now, instead of wearing suits, if he wears baggy jeans that almost fall off his butt, puts on a few tatoos, nose rings to match, and starts doing seemingly illegal things. And if the cops still don't stop him, then maybe being white has something to do with it.

What about the prosecutors who have been asking her to tamper with evidence? Are they going to jail?

One has to take a grain of salt with Stephen Wolfram's claims of superiority.

Nevertheless, it appears that people have to pay to use "the Wolfram language" (although there might be scenarios that allow "free usage" for the purpose of attracting users who will eventually pay for using the language if they want to scale up their work). The concept of paying to use a language is troublesome in terms of common understanding of what a language is.

As someone who likes photography, I have to disagree about your reasoning. The clarity of your subject is as much about how much it is in focus as how much irrelevant things are out of focus. Portrait photos are often beautiful when the lens has good bokeh characteristics.

This is nice, but I don't think it is refactoring.

>> NP-complete is essentially shorthand for belonging to a class of problems that are computationally very hard

That is actually incorrect, and is a common and serious misunderstanding of beginners. NP-complete problems are not hard to solve (e.g. via brute force). They are however very hard to solve efficiently (i.e. in polynomial time).