thumper

This was my thought, too. I spent countless hours hiding inside of boxes as a child. I always found it comfortable to be "held" by the box, and loved the notion that I couldn't be seen by others.

My cats did not join me in the box.

That seemed pretty convincing, but then I added some comparison terms like "instagram" and "snapchat"... they are hardly a blip. I think that argues that the world is going mobile, but then maybe google trends isn't a fair way to measure who is walking where.

The crazy thing is that when people say that to me, I kinda roll my eyes but try it so that I'm not dismissive... and sometimes it works!

I had the same experience -- I didn't fully grasp how useful XHP was until I had to use it. Not only are they reusable components, but the type system they create and can enforce is a powerful aid to helping me suss out how they were meant to be used. (Now if only XHP::render could detect when it's already been called, to avoid weird validation bugs from the side-effects!)

And when I had to include some multi-line javascript in my code, I found myself feeling a huge loss. First, heredocs seemed to be the only way to make it readable. Second, I'd have to actually run the code and interact with the page to find out if I got the syntax right. It would be awesome if there was a way to make JS into an object in PHP, the way that XHP is done, and have it support some simple sanity checks and easily import JS components (which I suppose Javelin tries to do).

IPTDL (I prefer to date lawyers) and "that's what she said." More specifically, that income comes in many forms, and that even stock/options (in exchange for services) could count unless all the correct paperwork has been filed.

cough Worlds Chat cough

Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder.

It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.

Language is a tool. Certainly, some people will create literature and others are merely hacks. Some languages will be conceptually cleaner, some more pure, and some an amalgam of expressions "borrowed" from other languages.

No, Virginia, Perl is not dead. Not as long as there is more than one way to do it, or a hacker trying to finish something that was due yesterday.

Perl, as we know it, might pass from this earth. But the spirit it embodied, that first we should use duct tape to build on the work of others then write glue to make it stick, that getting-things-done was the primary goal --- this is too close to the core of our restless selves. A thousand years from now, there will be some startup somewhere with an urgent need and a hacker that strokes his chin and says, "I think I could write that in Perl[1]..."

[1] replace "perl" with your favorite language. Pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes means "the tool you are most familiar with", but that says more about you than about the language.

I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".

thanks! I totally missed that in my effort to reclaim some of my time.

One thing that I have been itching for is an RSS feed of the top articles. Maybe there's already some way to get that which I haven't found?

When I was in high school and college, my measure was to enter programming contests where competition was on time and following a spec. I did well on these, and I agree with earlier posters that this boils down to being familiar with a language and its libraries, as well as the most common algorithms that show up time and again in these contests.

As I've "matured", I feel like my raw speed is slowing down. I think that there are a lot of factors in that, like working on much more challenging problems, and switching back and forth between too many languages (so that I don't know any one quite as well).

Really, I think it's better to worry about working on stuff that you love, rather than how fast you're doing it.

My lawyer friend asked me to set up some "extranets" for her, because she came from a firm background where having private websites for each client was the norm. I looked into this a bit and I found "Ajax File Browser" available at SourceForge. This was a good solution if you want to do all the hosting yourself because you don't trust third-parties.

My first thought was "US" and "Halliburton", but then I suppose we fill in the blanks with the protagonists we know best. The one thing that has me stumped is the python angle...

Another example that came up while I was testing the Zeo: their tracker asks how much caffeine you have after 3pm daily. While I was messing around with their graphs, I discovered a clear correlation between cans of soda and poor sleep the next night. That might seem "obvious", but it was a real surprise to me because I had never noticed any relation at all. At the time I was trying to stop soda at 6pm and I go to bed at midnight, so it was even more surprising that the effect was so long lasting.

I run on a Macbook (not Pro!) with 4GB RAM. For a while, I was doing some IE plugin development and went with separate VMs for IE6, 7, and 8 (used the MSFT distributed VirtualPC ones, actually). That got me used to the idea of switching back and forth being VMs, and now I have separate Ubuntu VMs for each project I work on -- switching back and forth as emails and phone calls come in. Working this way really helps me compartmentalize my projects, especially not worrying with how I muck up the OS installation as I need some crazy tool or other for a particular task. It's also divorced me from excessive customization of my rig, so that I don't mind upgrading when a new Ubuntu is shiny enough to make me go "ooh".

I thought this was interesting because I've seen a few cases where the business people were gung-ho, but you could see how the relationship would turn out from the negotiation. No doubt a commission incentive doesn't help, but this can apply to employment negotiations too.

I ran into this trouble just recently, in taking a job while still in grad school in California. The school has pretty broad language about owning all my ideas, but does reference Section 2870. On reading Section 2870, there are exceptions about ideas which relate to the employer's business (or anticipated business)... but what does this mean for the University of California?

My take is that the code doesn't specifically limit the exception to my job function; it's broadly worded to cover the whole of the business. And the UC works on so many areas of research that this essentially means that you can't work anywhere else at the same time if that other work requires any kind of confidentiality.

I tried to engage the IP department at my school about this, but got shuffled around and basically told that there are no exceptions or clarifications. They essentially supported this interpretation I have, and referred me to memos that explain the policy in more detail.

What I can't figure out is this: the policy requires that all students submit potential IP to them for evaluation. That includes IP from summer internships. Why are companies okay with this? In practice, I don't believe many (any?) students do this, but the Director stopped answering my emails when I tried to probe this question more deeply.

I jumped over this fence a few times, having done a startup after college, then did consulting for years, then dove into grad school to find out what "research" was really all about. I'm still in grad school, but just really took a job working at an industry research lab.

There isn't a clear cut answer because so much depends on your personality and what you want to get out of life.

What I can definitively say: if you've been out of school for a few years, getting an MS in CS is totally worth it. I learned so much about the "new stuff" that I never got around to when I was working, and the bigger toolbox has already paid off for me.

Beyond that, I sort of agree with other posters, but I'm a little more cynical about the long-term vs short-term aims of academia. I'm finding that my startup sensibilities work well for guiding my efforts in a PhD, but this is because I've come believe that grad school is essentially a machine for conferring reputation from professors to students. Keep in mind that even when your advisor gives you a lot of latitude (and that'll take years), you're still not your own boss... and that can suck if you're older than the average student.

Of course, working in a research lab has similar issues. You don't completely get to set your direction, there's a big bureaucracy, and you have to work hard to get people to understand your work.

Out of everything I've done, being in a startup where we all shared The Dream was the best.

I was looking around for the answer to this question, too. I was a little surprised at the ordering of the top couple of movies, and that got me wondering if "most popular" was normalized somehow. Are these the most popular from 2009? Were the numbers normalized for how long the movies were available via DVD?

If there's no normalization, then this gives a snapshot about movie popularity... something like a 1-D vertical slice from a visualization like one of these two:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...

http://xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html

I don't want to knock this new visualization, but I'm wondering what inferences would be safe to draw from the data as presented. It seems like it is most useful for comparing regions to each other; for instance, I was surprised at how varied the movie ordering was for adjacent neighborhoods in Manhattan.

It's not directly related, but I just ran into an interesting article on data analysis. It includes pointers to some good texts on topic, but also has some tips which aren't covered in the standard texts.

"Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don't Tell You" by Seth Roberts: http://sethroberts.net/about/2005_Three_Things_Statistics_Te...

My chiropractor recommended the "Dyna-flex" gyro ball, when I developed persistent pain years back. This worked great for me as a way to strengthen the muscles in my arm, and my pain went away after a month. Since then, I have a twinge periodically, but I swear by device because it seems to work so well for me (and I barely use it since that initial month).

It's possible that different underlying issues alter the effectiveness, but I think the general advice of "exercise" is a good one. I'd also add that there's potential to hurt yourself more, so I'd rewrite the parent comment as "you should also see a physiotherapist."

Thanks. Okay, I see what you're saying. Actually, they still won't make that information available, though we have been asking a while. That was a big challenge when we started, but I think it was a good constraint because it pushed us in this direction to think about how the text itself evolves. Upcoming work will be looking at new signals to inform the page quality, such as activity on the Talk pages -- so there's no shortage of ideas, only of time to work on it.

On the page views signal - there was a great paper in the last few years that came up with a way to estimate it from multiple other data sources (eg, Alexa). I don't remember the title, but it was an impressive bit of stitching together. If I had the time/money/resources, I would love to get that as a signal in our work and see if it helps. I'm not 100% convinced it would, because of vandalism I've seen which lasted for years on a somewhat popular page -- so even many eyes does not help if no one will take action to fix incorrect data.

I don't think that there was disagreement that there would one day be a problem, even in 2004. But "drawing on the same set of resources" doesn't seem like a fair way to think of it, especially to conclude that your idea would have led to the same thing.

I am one of the researchers on this project, and there are no "resources" which are being made available to us -- it's been something of an uphill battle to do more than just talk. We came up with our idea in January 2006, and spent the year implementing it. Even now, with this attention and with it being open source, there are no volunteers stepping forward to help make it a reality on the Wikipedia itself. We receive very little funding (from CITRUS and LANL, not Wikipedia), and I pay my own tuition from my side-job. Our research group has been really focused this last year to make the code "production ready" instead of just research code, but don't forget that we are academics -- it's difficult to justify our spending time this way, except that we truly believe in the project.

In terms of "credit for the idea", the earliest published work that I have seen is the "Puppy Smoothies" article in First Monday ( http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar... ) We cited that and every other blog posting (unusual for an academic paper!) we could find in our first paper. You'll see that there are actually several that existed at the time, but the real issue is in finding the man power to implement the ideas.