go1979

I did see someone pooping once. The train car cleared out pretty fast. I also got threatened twice during rush hour. When I first moved to NY, I tried talking to the good people at the counter ... never made that mistake again. After a bit, I just started taking cabs. I did encounter traffic jams periodically but felt a better experience overall. Btw .. I also have respect for NYC cabbies. They are the opposite of Bay area cabbies. I try to not use Uber when I am in NY. Anyways ... the NYC subway sucks when compared to international standards. If you travel a bit internationally, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I was at SOSP until earlier today. During the Q&A of the Chaos graph processing system, there was discussion of a previous exchange between Frank McSherry and the authors of the work ... what was REALLY cool was that parts of the original exchange happened on Twitter and via blog posts and we were hearing about it at the conference some time later :)

Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?

I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.

I got a USB dongle that seems to work under 1GhZ. I was really interested in analyzing zigbee. I think that's in the 2.4GhZ ISM. Any suggestions?

I'm also curious ... are these cheap USB dongles just receivers? Or do they have ones that can transmit as well (i.e. transceivers).

The recent run up in property prices in most major western cities makes me think the home owning class isn't in too bad of a shape. If you own a house in Vancouver, the Bay area, Toronto, London etc. you basically won the lottery. If you are a young adult, well ... hope your parents help you out?

My parents were immigrants and not savvy enough to buy a house. I'm wondering how I can ever afford a 200K down payment on a million dollar house, and if that is in any way a reasonable idea. Taxing income is the wrong approach since people getting income are contributing to society. The lottery winners who happened to own houses in the right place .. I'm not sure what they contributed.

Very much a personal opinion from someone coding for 15 years+. I'm new to Elixir but I found it to be a joyful language to work with so far. Java is a language you code in to pay the bills. Go is not bad at all but while I've heard people remark Go is fun, it hasn't been that fun for me. A bit of ugly syntax here and there. Python is awesome but I'm tired of the v2/v3 crap and frankly don't think it is the right tool for large, multi-person code bases (e.g. Openstack). Elixir has been truly enjoyable for me. If you are a jaded dev who used to love languages, give Elixir a try. I hope you get the same joy that I am getting from it because it has an ineffable quality about it.

[edited]

Thanks. Another point is that in Erlang/Elixir, if you have many actors, you will have less garbage per actor. Which means faster GC overall.

The best known example for Erlang/Beam "http throughput" is WhatsApp's 3 million+ concurrent connections per host. I don't think you get anywhere close in Akka. Maybe max out at 50K per server? Is even that possible?

Also, I'm not aware of good examples that use Akka with Java. Everyone I know using Akka seems to also be using Scala (not sure if it is just some kind of self-selection). I really can't stand Scala's syntax. I tried two or three times but I find it too easy to encounter Perl like unreadable code. Just my opinion though.

I've coded in Python and Go (which has compile time type safety and does inference to avoid verbosity) code professionally, and am loving Elixir. I build distributed systems and I while I love Python, I don't think it is the right language for that. Frankly, I prefer nodeJS's single thread to Python's GIL because you are under no illusions wrt concurrency. Go is better but I don't understand why channel communication across machines doesn't exist (I think it was there as an experimental feature early on but maybe I am mistaken). I'm very impressed by the capabilities of the Beam VM and hope that Elixir will let me build better distributed systems (despite the lack of type safety).

I'm trying to convince people at work to use Elixir but people seem to have language fatigue. The lack of a major company/product using Elixir is making me worried as well. But hey .. someone had to be first, right? :)

I'm surprised about the drug trial bit. I thought generics didn't need to have new trials .. they just need to have the exact same formulation. The oddness is that they need to "reverse engineer" the formulation themselves. The pill's color, shape and markings couldn't be copied though.

Can anyone knowledgeable on this critique what I wrote? I got my info during a tour of a generic drug manufacturer's plant a looooong time ago.

I think so too. Guess real-estate prices will keep going up, up, up :( Not sure how this craziness will play out.

Top echelon PhDs don't get paid as much as lawyers or doctors of similar caliber btw.

Toronto != Downtown Toronto. Part of the reason everyone wants to live in the core is the horrible public transit system. I used to live uptown but near the TTC - almost every weekend in the summer, we had to use shuttle buses because of track maintenance.

When I look at the GTA, prices make no sense to me. Million dollar homes in Markham, 600K townhomes in Mississauga? What incomes justify this?

I do agree with you on the "low interest rates or else" theory. Even a few points increase will cause people at the fringes to exit the market. And that has potential to topple everything over.