afrancis

6 ms·

1.
by afrancis 9y ago
I would argue that you are generalising based on looking at a particular model of how we use digital assistants. How about scenarios where organisations and individual develop digital assistants that are not financed by an advertising model
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by afrancis 9y ago
I believe a large part of getting better at coding is reading about good coding practices and simply reading other developers' code, regardless of its quality. For example when I was in junior college a programmer-on-duty recommended I
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by afrancis 10y ago
I glanced at the Clive Thompson article. I disagree. I feel movements like "software carpentry" ( https://software-carpentry.org ) are a good indicator of what mass computer literacy will look like in the workplace and s
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by afrancis 10y ago
A problem I found with article is the talk of opacity of statistics techniques in the guise of "big data" used in social media corporations. Statistics used by individuals and companies is nothing new. As a counter-example, I feel
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by afrancis 10y ago
Watching "Rogue One," the real-world historical parallel that came to my head was that Galen Erso was modelled after Werner Heisenberg and Nazi A-bomb programme. I was surprised, Heisenberg was not mentioned in the essay: maybe th
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by afrancis 10y ago
I can't recall anywhere in the literature that refers to being inspired by UNIX's select(). Golang's select comes from the Bell family of languages such as select in Newsqueak or alt in Limbo. In turn, channels in these langu
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by afrancis 10y ago
Love my Pebble. Has almost everything I wanted in a watch. Found it a pity that on the marketing front, Pebble never seemed to get top of mind (or anything near there). My current's watch's display is starting to shred. Debating b
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by afrancis 10y ago
Although I have used both CPython and Stackless.py, the specific differences are fading from my memory. While working on a Go style select() for stackless.py I recall there were minor differences in how the runnable list is represented and
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by afrancis 10y ago
Although I am not aware of any recent development, you should look at Stackless Python which was inspired by Limbo. Stackless Python has lightweight threads (stacklets) and synchronous channels a la various Bell labs family of languages (in
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by afrancis 10y ago
I find with all the voice APIs out there, I would recommend choosing one and diving in. One of the skills is getting comfortable with the interactions between the voice API and the back-end.
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by afrancis 10y ago
And there is Margaret Thatcher, who had a Bachelors in Science: Chemistry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Early_life_a... ). Canada's former P.M Stephen Harper, in his early twenties, was a compute
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by afrancis 10y ago
Well the Trudeau government just earmarked 50 million for five years to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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by afrancis 10y ago
@trtobe: you could ask the supermarkets. Doesn't hurt. Perhaps you would have better luck promoting this idea with grocery stores that have loyalty cards? Loyalty cards I suppose are already used to track specific users and what they p
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by afrancis 10y ago
Hi Mandela: By Siri, I am assuming your mean some application that understands speech and carries out commands like answering queries, or carrying out a command? Answering queries is specific domain of NLP. As is developing the acoustic mod
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by afrancis 10y ago
Case studies provide all the required information in the case itself. Do you believe this to be right? The case study is a learning tool. The required information is a starting point. It is up to the student to use the information "
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by afrancis 10y ago
MBAville builds games for business education. Our first product, Project Quant, teaches Accounting, Analytics and Economics in a gamified pizzeria setting. We find the classroom to be boring and un-engaging. I have taken MBA courses. For
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by afrancis 10y ago
To me, a large part of process improvement is statistics, statistics and more statistics. I don't understand how storytelling alone, just as creating Visio diagrams alone could come up with a regime that allows one to measure, analyse,
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by afrancis 10y ago
A paper log book. I like writing by hand.
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by afrancis 10y ago
This idea reminds me of the "Mr. Apology" answering machine project. Poignant stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bridge
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by afrancis 10y ago
I vaguely remember discussions about flight logs and manuals when I worked at a company that made SGML tools. Aren't there certain FAA requirements that revolve around stuff like signatures? Perhaps new vehicles would benefit from a an
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by afrancis 10y ago
Isn't web assembly going to help address many of these problems?
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by afrancis 10y ago
I have been thinking about this one a bit more. I believe the idea is to remove various sources of friction in the system. You may be able to get away with not scanning. Again, pretend the store has a system to send you the grocery bill in
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by afrancis 10y ago
I am not sure how your model differs from online Hotel companies in North America? By "Uberlike" do you mean surge pricing? More questions. Do you know if Airbnb have problems booking rooms in Africa? What is the vacancy rate of a
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by afrancis 10y ago
My question: do parents really save money from "Kids eat free" deals? Is the average cost of the meal for the adult higher? Also how do you make revenue and profit on this concept?
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by afrancis 10y ago
I thought the critical success factors for getting into a management programme in a university would be one's grades and one's SAT scores? Also what constitutes an "elite business student" especially since the student ha
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by afrancis 10y ago
I have thought about this problem and like your goals. Like @rkho stated, re-scanning is a pain. Perhaps if you could somehow get buy-in with the grocery store: the store sends an electronic copy of the bill that can be processed; have a pr
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by afrancis 10y ago
"That's right, we already have manned wheelchairs roaming the streets, so it's not too different." However you probably don't want a person in a wheelchair delivering one's pizzas .... Tom, again I would recomm
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by afrancis 10y ago
One problem with Zippy would be it contending with a myriad of laws stemming from whether Zippy is a vehicle, especially a motorized vehicle on a sidewalk. Let's ignore the unmanned part for now. "Having small items delivered to h
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by afrancis 10y ago
"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and wri
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by afrancis 11y ago
It has been a while since I looked at it, but I was impressed by Russ Cox's implementation of channels in the LibThread library of Plan 9. All channel operations including blocking on several channels and selecting one that is ready, a

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