drather19's comments

Have to second the recommendation for Jins (and they also have a location at Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose). If you have a prescription, you can be in and out with a new pair of glasses in less than an hour. There's a nice selection of frame styles to choose from, and AR/high index lens are bundled into the cost (~$80-120). Lens extras like transitions, progressives, polarized/tinted, and/or blue light filters are extra and special order (2-3 weeks).

They have onsite eye exams as well for ~$65, but you'll need to find a way to reimburse with your insurance provider on your own (for out of network).

Make that two coffees!

I attended the "See, Think, Design, Produce" one-day session that Tufte put on with guest speakers Jonathan Corum, Bret Victor, and Mike Bostock (back in 2014). It was a great set of lectures, but TBH, felt that Tufte's talk was the least engaging/practical/applicable.

I'm definitely a bigger fan of Tufte's books than his in-person lectures.

WaPo article (with provisional ruling linked as well):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/07/16...

When I was considering Tidal vs. Spotify in the past, I ran across the ABX tests here:

http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Pretty much found the same thing for myself at 256+.

I think you have that backwards.. Manchester by the Sea distribution rights were picked up by Amazon (for ~$10M at Sundance last year). I don't believe they were involved at all in the production.

I like the point about building systems that take care of themselves and are largely hands-free. I'd say that applies regardless of platform (or "shininess"), though. The author has clearly internalized one of the more important lessons in engineering in terms of designing for maintainability (with an ultimate goal of zero/low-effort maintenance and/or extension).

I'm not sure the platform itself is as important to achieving this goal so much as the decision-making ability of the engineers themselves, though. Maybe a tendency to pick shiny because of shiny is just a way that poor decision-making surfaces? However, I don't see a problem picking an appropriate solution that happens to be shiny.

Anyways, kudos for sharing the wisdom.

Where's the pain-free device with open source, easily upgradeable firmware, that puts all of our IoT devices in their own private network but lets us tunnel through to them? It needs to be easy enough that our (grand)parents could pick one up on Amazon, Best Buy, or Home Depot and plug in and go...

The biggest difference maker for me in terms of alleviating repetitive strain was switching from a mouse to a trackball. Something about not having to tense my arm up and move the mouse all over anymore...

I guess where I was going was that there was a fairly high standard to "get in the door" first, after which experience seems to be valued more uniformly (at least more than in software).

We don't have the equivalent in software, and we also seem to have a recurring discussion about effective ways to filter people during an interview process. I've certainly had mixed results in my limited sample set when considering past experience to actual performance of hires.

Is there a good way to translate the value of someone's experience?

EDIT: For that matter, I guess I should wonder how folks translate the value of people in those other fields effectively (or if they do at all).

Several of those field mentioned also have fairly high barriers of entry in terms of certification. They try to ensure that folks pursuing those careers have a core level of understanding necessary to pursue work in those fields. Whether or not they're successful in doing that is, of course, a matter of debate (as everything is).

I know understanding CS fundamentals and employer expectations about this are a lightning rod here, so I don't want to apply a value judgement on that here. However, what's the equivalent to the board or bar exams in our field (that lets us compare ourselves to those fields)?

The order isn't quite as you put it -- it was only the earlier originals that Netflix couldn't afford to buy out. They aren't looking to license their originals back out at this point (exclusive + global is still the strategy going forward). They've even gone back and worked to pick up expanded rights in more countries for the ones they've missed (e.g., HoC).

While Netflix as a company is focused at doing one specific thing at large scale, they're heavily vested in microservices and do actually have "thousands of apps that are all doing very different things".

Chaos Monkey fits when people build and deploy their services with the notion that any particular instance (or dependency) could fail at any given time. It's a tough road to evolve out of a legacy, monolithic stack without much redundancy baked in.

Sounds like more Netflix through hotel set top boxes is in the works (e.g., http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2487505,00.asp).

As far as how much control Netflix retains over its internal vision/strategy in the long run, I'm not sure if there is anyone or any group in a position dominant enough to to swing the the company in a direction counter to its internal mission (http://ir.netflix.com/long-term-view.cfm). I think dedication to staying easy, convenient, ad-free, etc. is pretty critical to keeping the user base happy (beyond just being part of their core vision), and I don't see that changing for any reason for the time being.

It's an interesting thing to watch evolve over the next few years, but I know it sucks for most of the global market with the current catalog disparity. It's hard to say which of the platform or the content are the cart and the horse, though. Do you need the platform to deliver before you ramp the content, or do you need to ramp the content before you open up the platform?

It's interesting that you posit that the ultimate endgame is "corporate-friendly content". I was curious why you think that content is heading that way?

If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?

It sucks that House of Cards and some of the older original content (particularly the more popular titles) aren't globally available, yet, but I believe (also from the CES talk), this was done because Netflix couldn't afford the financial risk at the time (and/or simply could not afford the global rights) for some of these shows. More recent/upcoming shows are licensed globally, so there's an apparent effort to ensure that Netflix moves to having a single global catalog. This obviously takes time, though, as the whole original content engine starts to ramp and new licensing deals are struck.

We use Smalltalk for a good portion of our distributed control system on our semiconductor manufacturing equipment (at least the non-RT critical portions). It's actually sort of awesome to be able to test/rework/enhance the software on the fly as we discover things we'd like to change in the clean room without having to go through traditional implement/build/deploy cycles. There's certainly other caveats about working in the environment we have, but those we can chat about offline :).

From what I've read and played with (briefly), JRebel gives you a bit of this experience on the Java side as well, though I've never used it extensively enough to know if it delivers a comparable experience.

It's not that far removed from what many web application developers take for granted in terms of ability to make/test/refine changes on a live system with ease, but it does bring more of this experience to other functional domains.

The standard 1s time resolution on Graphite/Whisper also seemed to be a limiting factor for use with some of these systems, where you want to observe things on the order of milliseconds (or beyond).