xaa

43 ms·

331.
by xaa 14y ago
The hardware market is a competitive market, but the OS market is an oligopoly. I think it would be fair to say that most consumers want the OSX and care less about the hardware. Indeed, you could build a PC with equivalent hardware to a M
332.
by xaa 14y ago
3. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... 4. Yes, I qualified this with a "possibly". Their public statements have seemed to indicate that they are willing to change. But progress has been "mixed": http://news.cn
333.
by xaa 14y ago
Not talking about tablets and mobile devices. I'm talking about the way they bundle their PC hardware and software. And specifically about the way their TOS forbids installing OSX on non-Apple hardware.
334.
by xaa 14y ago
I know a few people who still use Kindle and Google Search, despite their infection with ads. Maybe Ubuntu will survive as well?
335.
by xaa 14y ago
Apple is trying hard to rival Oracle for the "most dickish technology company" slot. To recap, they've so far: 1. Partially reversed the commoditization of PC hardware, driving up prices for consumers 2. Engaged in large-scale App Store cen
336.
by xaa 14y ago
As a bioinformatician, I've been asked all of the following questions by (postdoc and above) biologists: - What is a binomial distribution? - What is the difference between a probability and a p-value? - If I have p-values for a case and co
337.
by xaa 14y ago
Neat concept. Concise summaries really make browsing for interesting articles easier. Although there is a lot of overlap between 140-character "summaries" and plain old titles, which tend to be about the same length. I think the body should
338.
by xaa 14y ago
Your guess is correct: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080409/full/452674a.html
339.
by xaa 14y ago
Memristors have the interesting property of adapting their resistance over time as current flows through them. Thus they can mimic Hebbian learning, a fundamental property of synapses, in a way that other electronic components, cannot easil
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by xaa 14y ago
> with Linux you give up great hardware (to varying degrees) I assume you're talking about Linux driver issues. But since we're talking about OSX vs Linux here, it's only fair to note that Linux supports a much greater variety of hardwa
341.
by xaa 14y ago
Yes, of course non- or soft-scientific phenomena exist. But until a soft science finds some way to quantify its data, it makes little or no progress. Take psychology as an example. The history of psychology until c. 1950 consists of differe
342.
by xaa 14y ago
I hope I'm not misstating the author's position. In my reading, he goes well beyond pointing out that some fields, such as linguistics or medicine, have made stronger cases than their data can support. He actually says "I do not believe in
343.
by xaa 14y ago
The author attacks skeptics' obsession with quantifiable knowledge at several points in the essay (e.g., the comp ling section), without providing an alternative. We have a word for "sciences" that are unquantifiable -- "soft" sciences. The
344.
by xaa 14y ago
To reply to point three, which is the only one not containing an ad hominem... There exist several larger OSS projects, such as Apache, Boost, the Kernel, etc, which accept contributions but are also curated. Thus they represent sort of hyb
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by xaa 14y ago
Great post! I have also found useful: - Record the (Git) revision number of my code for each run. - Use GNU make to manage the pipeline of downloading, training, evaluating, etc.
346.
by xaa 14y ago
What exactly is Twitter sample size? If it means "the number of records processed", why does it vary over time? One way to approach the "significance" problem for smaller communities like HN is to create larger bins of misspellings/correct
347.
by xaa 14y ago
For RNAseq the analogy works pretty well.
348.
by xaa 14y ago
A better analogy might be two different positions in basketball: shooting guard and center. To some degree, the two positions specialize: SG doesn't need to block shots (let's say), while the center does. However, everyone needs to dribble.
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by xaa 14y ago
Machine learning, natural language processing, linear algebra. Extra points for bioinformatics-related stuff. These are things that, obviously, aren't going to be on the top of a core dev team's priority list. They will come with time. But
350.
by xaa 14y ago
How has the library situation been? As a fellow Python developer, I'm very spoiled on libraries and every time I've looked at go, it doesn't seem to be gaining traction in that area. The page full of go libraries the OP points to is laughab
351.
by xaa 14y ago
Python has logic programming (Pyke). But, in principle, yes: you can't add new syntax to non-homoiconic languages. You can use macros (even C has macros), but they are more limited in a nonhomoiconic language. In my experience, though, meta
352.
by xaa 14y ago
Clojure and Java aren't really direct competitors. The appropriate comparison is to Python, Ruby, or Perl. I strongly doubt there would be a 2-3x difference in that case. Personally speaking, even though I really wanted to love Clojure, I
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by xaa 14y ago
For most tasks, it's slower, but within the same order of magnitude. Performant processing of numeric data, however, requires quite a few ugly hacks (just like almost all functional languages).
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by xaa 14y ago
In the U.S. there is a documented deficit of students entering STEM fields, which includes (but is not limited to) CS. My thesis is that this is because these subjects are objectively harder than, say, business or English. Whether it's poli
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by xaa 14y ago
Of course, arrogance and elitism are bad. But I hope tech never stops being a meritocracy. I would wager that most would-be CS people are put off from the subject not because of the arrogance of current programmers but simply because the su
356.
by xaa 14y ago
I agree with all this, but it would be silly to blame Fox News or the Republican Party (or for that matter Apple, with its locking down of hardware/software and questionable environmental practices) for choosing what works . The blame is t
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by xaa 14y ago
> Why is it disturbing when Microsoft is starting to try to do something which Apple has already implemented with wild success? I think Apple (and certain Android manufacturers) have made the wrong choice for long-term consumer welfare
358.
by xaa 14y ago
Yes, pre-boot vulnerabilities were a motivating factor. But why forcibly disable Custom mode on ARM then? This is especially disturbing considering that ARM may very well be the major computing platform of the future.
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by xaa 14y ago
Why is this whole SecureBoot saga not being considered as anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft? It's pretty clear that the only "advantage" of SecureBoot is to hinder competing OSes. And that Microsoft has only been able to obtain such a f
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by xaa 14y ago
If MS didn't do a radical redesign now and then, people might catch on to the fact that they're being sold the same thing over and over for each new computer they buy.

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