I used it quite a bit when I was in China for things other than messaging. Have to say it was a great experience, it works with literally EVERYTHING. You walk on the street - bam the bagger is using wechat QR code to ask for donation. A large number of normal people I encountered don't even use their wallets anymore - menu on wechat, mobile payment on wechat, taxi on wechat, utility on wechat. It's something that after using it, you know there's no way back.
Genuinely curious, been looking into it recently - what're the problem with unregulated public offering? Things i can think of are insider trading, misleading information, ponzi scheme, etc.
Add "Our business model consists of paying salaries to ourselves, using investor funds."
The regulations that public firms are burdened with are intended to make it possible for investors to figure out if these kinds of shenanigans are happening at your company. Private firms are exempt, because only sophisticated investors can invest in them, and they can do their own due dilligence/can afford to lose their investment.
If your crowdfunded startup is willing to provide enough information for your investors to be able to figure this out, you may as well take it public.
I was really looking forward to that write up, as well. Unfortunately, the author must have some rule about not breaking the fourth wall. Or they avoid softballed summaries?
Some internets post weekly bitter satires of Hackernews to the internets. Hackernews finds it and misses the point entirely, of course: Hackernews is being laughed at, not with.
An internet finds a bitter satire of his industry and is endlessly amused at taking the piss out of sincere but naive youngsters who debate technical concerns without understanding the appropriate context and history. The mocker misses the point entirely: Hackernews didn't fail, the generation that came before did, in letting their culture die.
I'm definitely going to give this a shot, thanks for the link. Approaching ML at a higher level is exactly what I need to develop a better interest in it. I realize that underpinnings are important, but waiting 30 minutes for mnist on to process on my localhost is just unbearably boring.
If you try the course, be sure to make use of the forums for it too: http://forums.fast.ai . As you'll see, they're extremely active and helpful for all deep learning students (and all practitioners in general).
Disclaimer: I teach the course. Although it is free and ad-free... :)
Regarding AWS, one participant has created a system that lets you use spot instances for the course. It's published on the forum. Great way to save $$$ (400% or more...)
Thanks for the input! I'm a cofounder at Echo. From our experience, one tricky part of Android dev is the garbage collection. For the end users, garbage collection sometimes creates noticeable lag. That's one of the worst experience we want to avoid. So for Echo, it's almost always worth the tradeoff to reuse objects and avoid unnecessary new object creation, which means less garbage collection. But like you said, the middle-age objects could pose some problems in the future. Judging from the past trend, garbage collection will always be one rocky part of the Android land, which was quite a lesson for us when moving from the ios arc world :)
I've been developing on Android since the 1.x days. Garbage collection has and continues to suck on Android.
People should not be so blind to think that better garbage collection is going to appear soon, and that a real world improved garbage collector will magically make all the GC related performance problems go away.
Google has demonstrated over and over that they are extremely slow to improve things in Android (see Java version support, see audio latency, see NDK, see Eclipse/Gradle transition, etc). And when they do finally improve things, it usually is still lacking.
Garbage collection in general is hard to get right. Even in better environments with highly optimized/tuned GCs, it still causes problems. It is unlikely Android is going to leap frog these.
There is a fantastic book - "Why the west rules, for now" that deals with this question (the name sounds quite right-wingish, but it's actually a great history book). I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic to read it.
If I can bring some interesting observations of the author to this discussion, it's that West (including mid east+europe+later america) and East (mostly China+later japan) led at different times. West had a 2000 year head start and reached its peak during Roman empire. East finally caught up around 600 AD and was ahead till the eve of western industrial revolution. Backwardness in some period of history (whether it's in nature resource, technology, social organization), became advantages in others. So you see the power shift constantly happening.
The ultimate reason (obviously i'm doing a huge reduction here) the writer claimed that caused the last shift of power between East and West was simply that America was too far from China. China got the thoughts/technology it needed. Europe found a flood of new problems and solved them with new thoughts/technology.
While I don't completely agree with his arguments, it's nonetheless an interesting and well supported point of view and much better than many other books out there that deals with big history topic (eg. "Guns, Germs and Steel")
I just finished reading this book, and I found it extremely insightful. The overview of Western and Eastern history from paleolitic to the modern era really puts the entire question of West vs. East into a grander perspective.
However, the biggest twist and conclusion in the book comes from projecting the trends of social development into the future. Ultimately, this question will not matter as we march towards singularity or apocalypse at a frighteningly fast pace.
Don't sweat it Xuwen. Most people probably didn't notice, but I would email TC and do a re-shoot or photoshop it and replace the pic. I really like the name and branding.
It will probably come down to unbelievable consistency, ease of use / UX and customer service. As long as pricing is reasonable, you can win biz if the aforementioned is awesome. Have you looked into using a provider that uses non-toxic, eco-friendly detergents? Gotta push that hard and can run a premium level for it.
Jesus christ man, your first comment was enough. You make some valid points but you're not his mother and I think we all got the advice the first time. There's a fine line between constructive criticism and a soap box...
