incan1275
Joined 9 years ago
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117
Submissions
22
Member since
Jun 29
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
It was for us. Things we use it for:
- Using it as a timer for cooking in the kitchen. - For music at home. - Listening to weather reports and news in the morning before we head out for work.
Before Alexa, we used our phone for all the above, but we found it to be much easier using a voice assistant. I wouldn't say it's a massive gain in productivity, but we are pretty happy we got it.
Comment · 9 years ago
Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York. Really great engineers in that lab.
Comment · 9 years ago
He has some great points about SIGMOD/VLDB reviewing - they emphasize far too much on "algorithmic novelty", instead of impactful simple systems. However, in terms of graph processing, I too think in many instances, single machine processing is too limiting.
In general, I think people would be more convinced if there were real cases in industry where engineers switched from distributing graph algos to single-machine algos because they found performance benefits were better. In all my years, I haven't heard of a case like this (it's always been the other way around).
Comment · 9 years ago
Seriously, using Google search trends isn't the best way to analyze usage or popularity. GitHub stats (assuming they are publicly available), would be much better.
Comment · 9 years ago
Currently halfway through: Emperor of all Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Amazing portrait and biography of cancer. It outlines the history of cancer, chemotherapy, surgeries and the drugs use to treat so many patients who gave their lives for cancer science.
The author is a good writer, but occasionally delves into minute historical details that I sometimes don't care for. Still, it's very enlightening.
If you read this: https://blogs.microsoft.com/?p=52550473
you'll see that their post does not mention the housing situation at all. I wonder where they will find all the non-engineers and execs - the janitors, the guards, the cooks, the receptionists - who are being pushed out by every acre that gets taken over by Apple/Google/MSFT.