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sthlm

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www.youtube.com 8y ago

Steve Yegge: “What Would You Do with Your Own Google?” (2011) [video]

sthlm
2pts0
github.com 9y ago

Open Source Software needs more time, not (only) money

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2pts0
www.cio.com 9y ago

IBM has the largest enterprise Mac deployment in the world

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3pts0
www.youtube.com 9y ago

Young Elon Musk featured in documentary about millionaires (1999)

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2pts0
fortune.com 10y ago

Apple Nabs Nest's Former Head of Technology

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2pts0
github.com 10y ago

D3-axis – Human-readable reference marks for scales

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2pts0
www.microsoft.com 10y ago

Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends today

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4pts1
www.tomtunguz.com 11y ago

The Runaway Train of Late Stage Fundraising

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1pts0
www.kernel.org 11y ago

Linux kernel coding style

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124pts101
www.linuxatemyram.com 12y ago

Linux ate my RAM

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1pts2
github.com 13y ago

Js-objectdetect: Real-time object detection with Javascript

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1pts0
www.couchbase.com 13y ago

Couchbase Server 2.0 released

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2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 13y ago

Bernoulli discovered e by studying a question about compound interest

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51pts16
www.reuters.com 13y ago

Financial Times Deutschland laid to rest

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2pts0
humanfaceofbigdata.com 13y ago

The Human Face of Big Data

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2pts0
graphlab.org 13y ago

GraphChi – Disk-based large-scale graph computation

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7pts0
onepagelove.com 13y ago

One Page Websites and Landing Pages Catalog

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1pts1
rcs.seerinteractive.com 13y ago

Interactive Overview of Monetization Strategies

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2pts0
www.kickstarter.com 14y ago

Light Table funding successful, including Python support (over $300k raised)

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137pts64
www.winrumors.com 14y ago

Microsoft confirms Zune HD death

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2pts0
slashdot.org 14y ago

Most of us still use pen and paper

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1pts0
www.freepatentsonline.com 14y ago

US Patent for Snowman Apparatus [pdf]

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3pts0
finance.yahoo.com 14y ago

CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012

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46pts13
www.economist.com 14y ago

Chart: Female Graduates Outnumber Male Graduates in OECD Nations

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5pts3
www.oecd.org 14y ago

2011 OECD Report on Education Includes Data on Equality, Costs

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Why are there no good online voting/election tools that are also free?

sthlm
5pts8
MacBook Neo 5 months ago

Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.

Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.

From the article:

“A bank mistakenly making such a large transfer shows its controls aren’t working adequately, and it’s embarrassing,” said Dieter Hein, an analyst at Fairesearch

Also:

The error should have been caught by an internal fail-safe system known as a "bear-trap,"

The issue is not that someone said "let's not have any controls", but that the controls failed.

Additionally, yes, ranking all transaction and double-checking the big ones should probably be part of a fail-safe, but I assume that even more harm could be done by a larger amount of minor issues that go unnoticed over a longer period of time.

Quick, Draw 10 years ago

This is the best "visualization" / "explanation" of the possibilities and limits of AI that I've seen.

I can show this to someone and say:

1. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what it thinks a feather looks like.

2. The software can't recognize a feather if it's never seen a feather like that. It's not a sentient being.

This is good, because most examples focus on point #1 and -- if enough marketing is involved -- don't go enough into point #2.

People read news articles like "X can recognize cats in a picture with Y certainty!" and are quick to assume that this "AI" can make sense of a picture and understand it, when all it does is apply certain methods for a certain use case.

This does a much better job by letting people write (or draw) their own test cases and figure out the limits intuitively.

I can recommend to peruse the source code. It's well written and documented. Such projects always put a smile on my face, since they demonstrate how far we've come in some respects:

- We've learned how to write and produce reusable, easily digestable code

- Python gives us a language that is concise, readable

- Frameworks like OpenCV let us do incredible things

- Open Source allows us to share it and collaborate*

- Platforms like Github facilitate the entire experience

10 years ago it took forever to configure my webcam on my Linux machine. I had to scour mailing lists and custom web sites to download various versions of kernel patches. Now my webcam is built-in and it takes 2-3 commands to take something off of Github and have fun.

* Of course Open Source is not new, but today it really seems like "Open Source won".

In Javascript, many unicode characters are allowed [0], so háćḱéŕŃéẃś is a valid variable name [1].

Note: The number of іllэБіъlэVаѓіаъlэИамэѕ [2] used in your production code is inversely proportional to the number of friends you'll make in the maintenance team.

[0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers

[1] https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%...

[2] http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegible...

The Yahoo Directory was Yahoo's first product.

This is a stark reminder that very few things last and maybe a point to reflect how Yahoo succeeded and failed to pivot into other directions.

Can you imagine Google terminating Search? Facebook terminating their home page? What else would they do and would they be successful?

In a historical context, back in the day directories were a big deal, it took a long time for search engines to become powerful enough to rival the usability. A piece of the old web is gone now.

Graphs are a poor visual representation for a lot of data sets. In cases where they provide significant benefits (think maps, dependency structures, routing), graph layouts are hard problems.

Generic algorithms are great for large networks but computationally intensive. Small network diagrams with an explicit message often have to be manually curated to make sense.

That said, this is a great library, especially since it works so well in the browser. I'm looking forward to future development.

I am a huge proponent of one-page websites for a variety of scenarios. I find that browsing existing examples is one of the best ways to get inspiration and ideas for what is possible.

It's also interesting to browse the source to get a feel for what's easily / hardly possible with different frameworks and how some things are implemented.

The Best 14 years ago

I had the following experience, which I considered quite useful.

I was traveling and in the meantime let a friend stay at my apartment. For this, I moved all of my belongings to the basement. After I returned, I shared my apartment with another friend. It was small and quite full, so I only took back the bare necessities from the basement. At some point I noticed that I had taken all that I needed from the basement, and that the rest was mostly unnecessary. So every once in a while I go to the basement to take out some things and throw them away.

The good thing about this approach was the following: Don't go through your stuff and think what you can throw away. Assume that you want to throw everything away and pick what you want to keep.

It's much easier to decide to keep something than to decide to throw something away.

I thought the whole budget was rather low compared to the total value that is to be created.

Sure, 100k for 1 language sounds odd, given that 200k was enough not only for 2 languages, but also the entire framework. Still, the overall price point is more than fair.

You have to take into consideration that Light Table aims to be specific; adding further languages will likely result in more efforts than merely adjusting an IDE a little bit.

A 2-finger solution probably wouldn't work so well on the iPad, and especially not on the iPhone. Consistency across devices is a pattern that Apple clearly follows.

I agree however that the method in the video is not so feasible either, for exactly your reasoning.

That seems to be a strange rule; how would they know where I'm from? As far as I know, Paypal doesn't normally release that information.

I could see how they might have to adhere to some sort of policy, yet I don't see how it could be enforced.

Not all libraries want you either. In my home town, the main library is so filled with students and high schoolers "hanging out" that honest researchers didn't have any more space. They started a policy that if you don't need the resources of the reading rooms (books, machines, ...), you're not supposed to use them.

My hometown has >1mio population, 3 universities and a lot of students occupying the libraries. Coffee shops can be a comfortable alternative.

I meant that the Neo4j API offers methods for graph traversal out-of-the-box which are likely the same ones that most people will use. MySQL doesn't have a default data structure for graphs (that I know of) or default algorithms.

So while the methods used to traverse the Neo4j graph are fairly representative, the data structure and algorithms used for the MySQL traversal are not.

Of course, I agree with you that the data structure itself is optimized. In general I'm not doubting Neo4j's ability to excel in most benchmarks. I just think the approach is very basic.

While the conclusion that Neo4j is usually faster will generally be true for most such comparisons, the method to get to this result is very flawed.

Traversal methods are built-in for Neo4j, so those can be used for representative testing. The MySQL traversal methods chosen are very basic and don't necessarily reflect the optimized methods people will use in production.

Neo4j performance is highly dependent on caching. If it has to fall back to access the disk store, performance goes down rapidly, which can happen with a large data set [1]. MySQL optimization is a whole different horse. I suppose a BTREE might be the correct indexing solution to use here, but more information about the cache size would be good to know here as well.

With such performance experiments it's always useful to add a memory profiler to the discussion. Java VisualVM is a nice one that integrates well with Eclipse [2].

[1] http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Performance_Guide#Disks.2C_RAM...

[2] http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/vi...

That's not necessarily true, you can abide the terms and create a real account with real information, but close your wall, etc, making it essentially a profile with your real name and profile picture.

That wasn't my point though. I get annoyed when I see these non-solutions being offered. Of course, barely anyone will mind the linking of their FB account. Those people who don't, have no obvious way out (sign up for a second email address to sign up for a second facebook account to sign up for spotify). To suggest otherwise is a bit insulting. The answer should have been: "We're sorry, this is just how it will be from now on."

Actually I think the fact that it's one-time use drawings increases creativity, because you don't have to bother with perfection.

The total costs of operation would be much greater than HW Investment + HW Operation (Power, Space, Cooling). Especially initial setup costs and maintenance costs are a big dent; other humongous cost drivers are high availability, etc.

The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing

Given that the article states that the entire system only ran for about 7 hours, I assume that it was one of those ideal use cases for cloud computing. So the benefit of having a disposable system adds value that is also missing in the napkin calculation. Sure, if you ran the 30k-core cluster for eternity, you might as well build your own data center. But for this case, the comparative cost analysis seems a bit pointless.

One more small nitpick: the $1279 you extrapolated from in your calculation was the peak cost, not the average cost.

PG is of course correct in suggesting that if you want to keep programming, don't accept a promotion to a non-programming role.

That's not what he is suggesting though: His statement doesn't include "if you want". He formulates it as an at-all-costs mantra -- stay in programming, for the worst could happen. It can be absolutely horrid advice to a number of people who would excel even more at other IT roles or management roles (see interesting comment from robertk [1]). I myself was long not considering applying to non-development roles, because many of those great opportunities are more and more looked down upon as "not programming". I know some people who've come as far as "Be Mark Zuckerberg or die trying", completely rejecting any business model that isn't two guys coding in a garage. I didn't actually read PG's comment like that -- I have the utmost respect for PG; but this is the background for why I authored such an opposing comment. I don't actually think the RAQs we are discussing were designed to be put under lawyer-like scrutiny ;)

Depends on what your goal is

Completely agree. Casual focus will rarely lead to greatness.

they should get out of the way and enable programmers to work optimally

For someone to get out of the way, he first has to be in the way. You make the general assumption that a manager is bad unless he actively changes his style. I cannot challenge this assumption for I have no data or ideas on where to find some concerning if managers are universally good or bad. And even then employee satisfaction might not be the only metric to measure success. Although I do think that having fun at work is one of the most, if not the most important metric. Many things would be better if everyone enjoyed their work.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3012765

What you're talking about is known generically as the General Learning, which is an aptitude in itself. Some people learn better than others. It also depends on what you learn.

Nurture: At various ages, the ability to learn changes (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88....). It might well be true that there is a lot of optimization to be done in the way we teach -- something that Salman Khan illustrates well with his new teaching methodologies. That doesn't necessarily mean however that at all stages, ages, circumstances, people will be equally able to learn something.

Nature: Some people have an innate aptitude; I won't look for papers, as I find this to be truly obvious.

I wasn't actually arguing that people are born to be better at anything, although I suppose this is the general consensus.

Talent = "a special natural ability or aptitude" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Talent)

Aptitude = "capability; ability; innate or acquired capacity for something" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aptitude)

Like tentonwire argued, whether it's nature or nurture, people are better at some things than others.

From what I understand, you are effectively making the argument that anyone can excel at anything. In this case, I also concur with tentonwire, that the burden might be on you to prove that hypothesis.