andjd

The mini is not the budget option, at least not anymore. The base 11" iPad starts at $450 in the US (and can often be found on sale for less). It is the cost-down with lower-spec components, and is probably a more compelling product for the consumer looking for the cheapest iPad option than a cost-down mini would be.

Hi Matt,

Asking for a take-home challenge is a big ask without any form of human interaction first. Are you open to me asking a few questions over email or a video chat so I can gauge if your company would be a good fit for me?

How long have you been in your current role? You can talk with your boss, and let them know you'd like to go down to part time. No guarantees that they'll say yes, but if you don't ask, the answer guaranteed to be "no".

"junction" is pulling the heavy weight here. The station is right before the tracks branch, so the purpose of the station is probably to let riders transfer from service on the one branch to service on the other.

One important thing to know is that the venues/artists often get a kickback of part of the Ticketmaster fees. In other words, the artists, venues, producers, and Ticketmaster are in cahoots to fleece fans for as much money as possible, and Ticketmaster is willing to play the 'bad guy' and take the blame for high prices, and they get to keep a bigger slice of the overall pie than they would in a highly competitive market for ticketing services because they provide that "service".

Take away this dynamic, and the face price of tickets is going to go up, and the total price is unlikely to change substantially.

Personally, I think this would still be a net plus for society. In order for market forces to work well, you need pricing transparency.

> Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

Really? That's a bold claim. Having a large number of companies that are able to offer competing products and services tends to lead to innovation.

I would be curious how this compares to a more-or-less off-the-shelf text compression algorithm like gzip. My guess is that over the entire database, this would be more efficient than the OP's ad-hoc implementation or any alternative mentioned here.

Serious question:

The article points out that:

`C is far removed from modern computer architectures: there have been 50 years of innovation since it was created in the 1970’s.`

Is there a C-like language that uses abstractions based on current ARM or x86 processors? i.e. something above assembly that learning would help us understand how these modern processors actually work?

Even if this is not a foolproof way to avoid flying on a 737 max, using it will provide a very _visible_ signal to the airlines. If they're losing ticket sales because people don't want to fly on a 737, the airlines will find a way to adapt. Even a marginal change of a few percentage points can shift a route from profitable to unprofitable.

Airbus is already outselling Boeing 2-1. If you're looking at a 5-10 year lead time anyways, they can expand production to eat further into Boeing's share if that's what the airlines demand.

So, there is a defensible reason for this carve-out.

For generations now, video game consoles have had very aggressive cryptographic pairing of parts, done in the name of securing the hardware against hacking by the console owner. This is done to prevent mods to enable cheating and piracy. Given that consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales, there's a justification for this.

Providing replacement parts for game consoles would also require tools to re-pair the replacement parts. If these tools need to be provided to independent repair shops, there's approximately a 100 % chance of them getting leaked and destroying the security of the console.

I'm not going to say that this is a good or a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that there's a real reason for lawmakers to treat game consoles different than phones or computers, and that it isn't necessarily a sign of corruption.

I agree that owning the DSLR niche is a good strategy for Pentax. Ricoh hasn't given them the budget to make digital autofocus systems that are competitive with the other big brands, and it's likely hard to justify doing so with their market share.

There's an interesting world where Ricoh sells Pentax to Samsung or Apple or Google. Taking cutting edge computational photography from smartphones and applying it to a full-size camera with the sensors and optics to match could be really compelling. Pentax has good brand value and the optical expertise to make this credible to photographers, and there'd be growth potential in just taking market share from other players.

>I understand that the failure rate is high just like startups and movies.

I'd suggest that startups and movies have a much higher probability of 'success' than minting a hit song that can generate 1 billion streams. While there are a few stories of hit songs that organically break through, the vast majority are promoted _hard_ by the labels using resources (both money and connections) that are hard to amass outside the major labels.

It is an axiom that today, artists make all of their money touring. But even live performance (particularly at the largest venues) is dominated by monopolistic players. Without having a large number of headliner artists, you won't have the negotiating power to get favorable rates, and they'll eat you for breakfast too.

> What year will I see the legacy automakers utilize their advantages to sell more electric vehicles than Tesla?

<troll>Ford is selling thousands of F150 EVs a month. How many Cybertrucks has Tesla sold?</troll>