henningo's comments

To be fair, Linux users aren't really completely left behind, there's the web interface (play.spotify.com).

I'd be interested to know how many people use native app vs. web interface. The web interface is not always as snappy as the native apps, but if it bogs down I can just kill the tab and launch it again.

This is great news for Jupyter (IPython) Notebooks: https://plot.ly/python/offline/

It basically provides interactive inline visualizations, making it great for data exploration (without having to send any data to plot.ly)

I'm wondering if the success of Continuum (Anaconda) could've influence Plot.ly?

I agree that the analogy doesn't hold for the recent VW debacle (where the calibration was changed during certification testing), but it holds for the industry in large and what has been going on for the past 10-20 years, which is what the paper is about.

The vehicle manufacturers optimize the engine calibration to the drive cycle they are trying to beat. That is why a US-spec BMW has a different engine tune than a Euro-spec BMW for example, the drive cycles are different.

I think it is a bit unfair to just blame the manufacturers. The legislation could likely be changed to make for a more robust test approach. After all, it is engineers we are talking about here, if they are given a task to optimize an engine's emissions and fuel consumption to a specific drive cycle they will do it. But then of course you have the ethical aspects which I won't go into.

A computer science analogy to this would be if I gave you an uncompressed image and you had to develop a compression algorithm that made the image as small as possible, you could likely come up with a really good solution. But your algorithm most likely wouldn't do as well on any other image.

I think that a feasible solution to this will be to test under a wider range of conditions and add (statistically defined) noise to the testing procedures. The added cost of additional testing would be very small in comparison to the cost of a vehicle development program.

A good overview of the different drive cycles can be found here: http://www.car-engineer.com/the-different-driving-cycles/

Well done! Just one thing I noticed, the speed is mph and the distance unit is meters. Would be nice to change speed to km/h.

Articles like this just confirms my theory that car journalists are the biggest obstacle for the automotive industry to truly innovate. It is as if they dictate the requirements for the general public.

What the author completely seem to ignore is how turbos are key to the entire downsizing trend that is drastically changing the cars. With lower mass, less inertia and less internal friction, going back to first principles is what is making a difference these days.

Nice implementation - less is more!

What algorithm did you use for color extraction? I seem to getting colors with the correct hue, but too low saturation? (example: Ferrari)

You could also imagine to not show colors with very low saturation (ie. white/gray/blacks). I've previously used Colorific [1] which seems to address some of those things!

[1] http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/05/11/color-analysi...

Fair point,

Nonetheless, I felt the topic was worth discussing. In my experience "teams of very talented people" can often turn into "teams of very competitive people".

I have not read the full article (pay wall), but I have definitely experienced this in professional settings. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this, especially with startup's desire to build "killer teams"!

Did you consider doing spline fits to the x,y coordinates and then just saving the spline coefficients instead?

The fit process could likely be done client-side, and could offer some subtle smoothing if wanted?

Anyhow, really nice execution!

Of course, and I'm sure dealing with the many different data sources (ie. weather and TV listings) makes it even more complicated!

Yes, that makes sense, thanks for the insight.

Although this article discusses the actual collection and transmission of data, what I find more interesting is how efficiently the vast amount of data is being used in the decision making process for vehicle setup and race strategy. (I strongly believe that data has no value until it is used for analysis and decision making.)

Data coming from the vehicle sensors and other sources are concurrently being used for analysis (by both hundreds of engineers and a wide range of "algorithms") as well as input to simulation models. The results from the simulations means that even more data is being generated even when the vehicle isn't running.

Within minutes, using the data, the different engineering groups (typically responsible for a sub-system, ie. engine, tires, aerodynamics) arrive at conclusions which then the vehicle's race/performance engineers are using to enhance the setup of the vehicle. The results of changes are then fed back to the engineers, and evaluating if the analysis and predictions are correct is a big part of the post-event work.

I honestly can't think of any other industry that carries out this kind of analysis of highly non-linear systems at this scale and speed. The only other industry that I can think of is finance?

Disclosure: I work in motorsports

>"my current work visa application had been complicated due to a filing mistake"

Making a mistake is not an acceptable excuse for these people (even Brad Feld experienced this [1]).

Having been in the "backroom" twice I can attest how stressful it is and like many other stories, the lack of information is quite scary indeed. In my case, it was just a secondary screening triggered by me having had a student visa in 2006, a similar type of visa that the Boston bomber had had [2]. The officer told me that anyone who had held a student visa in the past 10 years had to go through this, so I'd imagine a fair few people here must have had the same experience.

[1] http://www.feld.com/archives/2013/03/the-joy-of-being-detain...

[2] http://blog.ogletreedeakins.com/dhs-orders-verification-of-f...

Very nice (I'd heart the software if I could!)

Hype machine is fantastic for music discovery. The big hits always surface there months before they hit the radio/mainstream.

Any chance for a Windows version (I'm stuck on a PC at work!)

Thanks, yes foundations is probably a better word. Are these usually a legal entity or just informally organized?