This is going to be interesting! Germany has had The Home Banking Computer Interface (HBCI, now FinTS) for years. I'm really looking forward how this pans out and if the protocol will be as convoluted.
Having these kinds of threads, I think, is very important for the community. On a related note, there has been quite some fallout from the haskell compilation times got worse thread, which resulted in the development of tooling around improving the situation.
It probably won't; I can see a child assembling this more easily than building a reprap though. I think the target audience are children and I see this (as their whole lineup)
as an educational product and gateway into engineering.
On the one end we have these fully assembled one-piece 3d printer. On the very other end we have DIY with or without a construction kit 3d printer. None of these are really targeted towards kids; this is, I think is.
Anyone reading this and being in the same boat, intending to get a degree. Please do yourself a favor and consider getting a degree in Physics, EE, Math, ..., and do some CS on the side. Sure CS might be easier, but you pass up the chance to widen your horizon.
EDIT: many will only study once; why not study something new? Even if tuition is free, why have someone teach you topics you might already be very familiar with? I'm not saying you won't learn anything new in CS. You very much will learn something new. But if you choose a related field with little to no exposure yet, you will learn so much more.
Anyone reading this and being in the same boat: Be very careful with this advice. There are high-paying jobs out there who will only consider CS grads. Why cripple yourself professionally learning something tangential to what you want to work in?
Anecdotally the majority of non-CS grads I've worked with haven't been anywhere near as good as CS grads.
> There are high-paying jobs out there who will only consider CS grads.
Are those entry-level jobs? For those I can see it. If you're hiring somebody with 5+ years of experience, though, only considering those with a CS degree is pretty short-sighted.
This is an unbelievably bad advice. People underestimate difficulty in learning core CS & Programming materials after they have learnt it. All the while underestimating difficulty involved in learning Math, Physics and EE. As someone who studied Chemical Engineering and later did an MS in CS and now a PhD. I highly recommend studying CS if you are interested in CS. Barring ECE (not EE) the amount of overlap between even Maths / Physics & CS is minimal.
I understood CS a long time before I understood all the math in EE. CS doesn't start to catch up to engineering in mathematical rigor until you are on the back half of your masters degree. I can teach you missing CS theory about how compilers or algorithms work on the job without too much trouble. I wouldn't dream of teaching you how to do polar coordinate conversion for AC circuit calculations on the job under any circumstances though. 4 years of CS is very easy compared to 4 years of engineering.
Theoretical CS is very important, but also quite academic. 99% of developers won't ever delve into that theory and will instead reach for a library based on that theory. The biggest issue in programming is managing large amounts of information that changes over time. This is not only completely avoided in most courses, it is also close to impossible to teach outside of gaining years of experience because every decision is a tradeoff and it takes time to build up an intuition for such things.
This is REALLY bad advice. Yeah, the high-flying finance firms will pay big bucks for Physics or Math majors that can code and think quick on their feet, but you have to be REALLLLY good to get into those firms, and those firms hold CS to the same level anyway.
If you want to become a software engineer, get a CS or CpE degree and do whatever you want as a minor.
Some anecdotes:
* My girlfriend got a Math degree from a good, but not Ivy-league, school with a minor in Physics. Turns out that the market doesn't value a B.S in Math as much as one would think. She landed up becoming a teacher, which she likes doing, but it's a field that's really hard to get out of without resetting your career.
* I went to school that had a cooperative education program. All of the engineering students were eligible to participate. Twice a year, the Co-op program had two days in which hiring managers from local companies (my school is in Hoboken, so local == NYC) would come to the school and interview people. We would put our names and majors on the lists that employers had, and they would select the people they wanted to speak with.
The CS and CpE students would always, without fail, get AT LEAST 7 interviews that day. Every other major would be lucky to get 2 or 3.
That's an interesting mindset. As someone who is self-taught, I consider a degree to be a formality that I have to wait for because I move faster than this.
The Internet is my chance to widen my horizons, if I want to learn physics or math, I can and I will, but a Physics or Math degree might not help me as much professionally.
This thread overly focuses on algorithms, which are not necessary for the majority of coding. What is necessary is the ability to handle abstractions, purity and regularization of thought. Mathematics, Philosophy and Writing are just or more applicable as a skill than being able to please an Online Judge.
Phabricator is a very good tool! But calling it a substitute for GitHub seems a bit off. GitHub (and GitLab) revolve around repositories. As the name implies they are focused on git and git workflows. As a user you are using `git` most of the time when interacting with the systems.
Phabricator on the other can supports `git`, but that's just one of the supported storage systems for phabricator. As a user you are using `arc`, phabricators command line tool.
I've seen many people having issues with using `arc`, having used, say github, prior to that. This got better recently when the `arc land` workflow was improved.
It's a fine substitute for GitHub. Both are source code and project management tools. Just because they have different user interfaces doesn't meant that they don't solve the same problem.
Phabricator is much more flexible and that comes with a small cost in complexity, but the result is a system which provides a superior workflow, especially in enterprise environments:
The whole argument boils down to how developers were treated with apples libraries so far. The submission/review process is quite prohibitive, and the core libraries (like almost every piece of software) have flaws. Together with the opaque intransparent radar bug reporting / bug resolution system, you had to resort to method swizzling to keep your sanity (I guess the PSPDFKit guys can speak volumes on that).
Going forward, I hope apple sticks to the open source approach they took with swift. That more of the libraries will follow, with Apple encouraging more community participation.
There are three very similar fruits I've met so far:
- Durian (looks similar to Jackfruit, a little rounder, and spikier), which is very popular in Malaysia and Singapore, and has a very strong smell. It has a more creamy consistency, and tastes quite different from jackfruit. People say, it's an acquired taste. Some love it, some hate it with passion.
- Jackfruit, I got to know this first in Viet Nam, but it can also found it in other places in Asia, smells and tastes sweeter. Also the reaction to it is less extreme than to Durian; I've seen it on the Seychelles as well.
- Breadfruit, I saw and eat it first on the Seychelles. It looks more similar to Durian, in shape, but less spiky. Apparently it has a very short shelf life, but you can make great fries from it.
It's very hard to describe taste. But I encourage to try it for yourself. (Or for Durian, maybe start with chocolate coated Durian candy, or Durian ice cream, and then go for the real thing; word of advice, if you buy it at the market in pre cut pieces to eat right away, and you do not intend to make it into cake or some derived dish, go for the more expensive packs, they are usually better, less mushy. You will likely have to get over the smell already, so taking the very mushy consistency out of the equation, may make for a slightly more pleasant introduction to Durian.
Jackfruit on the other hand is pretty easy, I would say. Just pay attention to get fresh, not squishy (e.g. they are too ripe, or old) pieces.
The unripe fruit tastes very different from the ripe fruit. It's common in Indonesia as well, where gudeg (unripe jackfruit curry) is the unofficial dish of Yogyakarta:
This a good question. But this hits a very interesting point. Let us discard crappy songs for a bit. And focus on marketing and other reasons. Marketing plays an important role. Yet there are artists who cannot afford the marketing or (and this is very sad in my opinion), the produced a piece that was ahead of it's time or just didn't fit the current market trends.
These kind of services allow us to explore the full spectrum of creativity, instead of homing in on current market trends. If we do not support the outlier (or in this case leave them lying by the sidelines and ignore them), we loose a part of cultural diversity. Not everyone has the same taste, but how do you experience new things when you just follow the herd?
Coincidentally I was talking with someone about House of Cards over lunch. And whether this is correct or not, it was claimed that House of Cards was the results of machine learning and figuring out that the majority wanted Kevin Spacey and a political drama. Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less diversity. This would be a very sad development.
This is precisely why I think that services like this one are very important to keep us culturally diverse. (at least in the limited spectrum of songs available on spotify in this case.)
> it was claimed that House of Cards was the results of machine learning and figuring out that the majority wanted Kevin Spacey and a political drama. Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less diversity.
If the algorithms are actually any good, they should lead to more, not less, diversity. The algorithms would be able to detect that enough people want to watch a Kung-Fu thriller set in medieval South India starring Summer Glau to be viable - the point of these things is that "big data" machine learning can process several orders of magnitude more data than a Hollywood-bubble studio executive gut feeling ever could.
Formulaic mass-market blockbuster stuff is the product of humans and their gut feelings, and broad averages over the mass market is the highest abstraction they can handle. Algorithms have no such limitations.
The truly niche/innovative out-of-left-field stuff exists because it was able to bypass concerns about mass-market viability - if anything, the algorithms will pick up on niche trends much quicker, bringing it to a larger audience.
> If the algorithms are actually any good, they should lead to more, not less, diversity. The algorithms would be able to detect that enough people want to watch a Kung-Fu thriller set in medieval South India starring Summer Glau to be viable
They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.
When a film in a series makes only half a billion it's seen as a failure and people are called in to make the next one a success.
> “They had a script for Star Trek that wasn’t really working for them,” [Simon Pegg] told magazine Radio Times (via The Guardian). “I think the studio was worried that it might have been a little too Star Trek-y.
> “Avengers Assemble, which is a pretty nerdy, comic-book, supposedly niche thing, made $1.5bn. Star Trek: Into Darkness made half a billion, which is still brilliant. But it means that, according to the studio, there’s still $1bn worth of box office that don’t go and see Star Trek. And they want to know why.”
> He further explained “People don’t see it being a fun, brightly coloured, Saturday night entertainment like the Avengers,” adding that the solution was to “make a Western or a thriller or a heist movie, then populate that with Star Trek characters so it’s more inclusive to an audience that might be a little bit reticent.”
> They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.
That may be what they want, but that's not all they make. To wit, plenty of shows and films (indeed, a large majority in number) aren't blockbusters, and don't appear to have been intended as such.
Films that are expected to make 1.5bn, but only make 0.5bn are failures in that regard, sure - but that doesn't mean that there isn't a large market for films that "only" make 0.5bn.
>They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.
They want predictable profit. If machine learning will allow producers to make better predictions on niche market - they will go there too
>> Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less diversity. This would be a very sad development.
Debatable, surely. Especially since House of cards on NetFlix was a remake of a BBC drama from 1990 [1]. Suggesting that diversity exists because someone could be bothered to make it, presumably without data-mining. The point is that this diversity is, predictably, not in the mainstream.
