Recent submissions

Comment · 9 years ago
Well he’s calling for more education and awareness. It’s like Big Food. The entire CPG industry has been stuffing people with sugar, salt, and fat for decades, exploiting human nature. We are finally seeing society resist this as we have become educated about the dangers of sugar and salt consumption. Meantime, putting ethics aside, all the major food and beverage companies made hay for a long time until recently. What is ethical and what is money-making can be at odds for a long time before they converge (if ever).
Comment · 9 years ago
I run an AHK script with a little over 2000 abbreviations (e.g. typing 'abbn' expands to 'abbreviation'). It helps me type 100+ WPM without too much strain.
Comment · 9 years ago
I think PG once wrote an essay explaining that most press is agenda-driven and there's somebody with money behind the story.

I wonder if that's the case here. F1 just passed out of Bernie Ecclestone's hands and has a new leadership team as well as shareholder base. They are aiming to revamp the sport and make it more exciting by addressing a lot of the issues brought up in other comments, like the rules stacking the deck in favor of rich teams and the fact that there is no streaming/digital option available to global fans.

Comment · 10 years ago
Yes, sell-side (i.e. brokers like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, etc.) analysts do share their models with clients. They do this both in 'hardcopy,' pasted into published research reports, as well as 'softcopy,' sending or publishing the Excel file. Not exactly mainstream distribution, but 'public' in the eyes of the SEC and something you can find if you look for it.
Comment · 11 years ago
What kind of demand do you think there is for a Linux-only mainframe?

My limited understanding is that most mainframe customers are locked-in, e.g. they have legacy COBOL code running their ledger system and the expense to switch off of it is simply prohibitive. That plus the fact that the system is reliable, low-maintenance, etc. preserves the status quo, despite the fact that if you were to write the same applications today, you'd choose a newer platform because it would be more cost-effective.

As such, IBM has historically offered z/Linux and co-processors only to hold onto data and processing that was being pulled off of the mainframe because it was too expensive/too onerous to do on the mainframe using z/OS and the like. So customers, unable to completely shut down their mainframe, could kind of make the best of a bad situation and at least get some cheaper Linux cycles out of their expensive iron.

If the above is true (and correct me if it's not) what is the appeal of a Linux-only mainframe? Or is it only interesting if it is radically cheaper than a z13?

Comment · 12 years ago
This is interesting and I'd like to hear more opinions on it. My impression is that distributed computing has been eating Power/Sparc/Z processors' lunch for a long time now because software has made up for the deficiencies of coordinating 30 boxes. Do you and do any others believe that we are at an inflection point where the pendulum swings back in the direction of 'high-performance' processors like Power8, or will improvements in 'scale-out' ease-of-use and economies of scale continue to win the day?
Comment · 12 years ago
Are the rovers too far away to drive there and check up on it? It's amazing to me that it has taken us so long to arrive at such a tentative result on the existence of water on Mars. In a weird way, I find it heartening that there are such unexplained frontiers facing humankind, places where we still grope around blindly.
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm interested in learning more about this. Does anybody have any thoughts? I think that, by intentionally posting unlikeable things, he guarantees himself 100% spam likes. On something that's actually likeable, these spam likes might be contained to a reasonably small proportion of likes. But what is the size of this shadow population of click farm users on Facebook? For these countries with large click farms to be the largest contingent of likes on big pages like David Beckham suggests they are not small enough to be manageable... I also don't know Facebook's revenue distribution well enough to gauge the business implications. Is it tilted towards small businesses that have serious trouble weeding out spam? Or is it concentrated with the large corporations that can garner large enough real audiences to ignore the spam?
Comment · 13 years ago
I had the same thought. Unfortunately, the article doesn't make it crystal clear how much information the neural net uses to bet against you. It would be patently unfair if it actually knew your hand. According to the article, this is not the case.

I suspect it does perfectly count cards that it has seen in its hand or community cards. This seems okay as well-trained human players can do the same. I suspect the machine would get even more play if this were obvious, maybe if it played at a table with a real dealer and could read community cards on the table. The technology to do this certainly exists.

Comment · 13 years ago
What does IBM have to contribute to self-driving cars? Google's work has gotten by far the most attention.

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