ypavan

Duplicate entry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1018454

The submitter added the known "#' at the end of the linked URL to resubmit again.

Thanks Matthew Blair

This is delightful.

An excerpt:

"I'll pour a quiet glass of champagne then or on 2010 January's first day and lift it to this coming year's surprises, to all the coming unawares, to the inevitable reshuffling of the deck, to the complexity of it all, to what I cannot now know, to what I cannot now guess, to what I have no clue, to what I cannot now control, to what I cannot now guarantee, to the out-of-the-blue bolt of lightning, to the unpredicted, to the unexpected, to the unfamiliar, to the without warning, to the out of nowhere, to the unforeseen, to never stepping into either the same river or class, to all the twists and turns in life's road that will keep me from falling asleep at the wheel, to the unplanned interruptions that like an earthquake will shake me from the doldrums of routine, to the as yet unknown challenges that will keep me from atrophying, and to the unanticipated adventures that will keep me questing for truer answers."

What do you do for the new year?

From the post:

Let’s take unstructured search as an example. Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover’s algorithm.

Summary:

It’s not the easiest way to approach the world, but the cycle of passion, criticism, vulnerability, conflict, and resolution is perpetually educational.

Dangerous Signs? From their FAQ:

>> Is Google Public DNS based on open source software, such as BIND?

>> No. Google Public DNS is Google's own implementation of the DNS standards

Ramit Sethi has written a blog post on Cal NewPort titled - "Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm"

URL: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/time-management-ho...

SSD = Solid State Device (Drive) HDD = Hard Disk Drive

IMO, one interesting thing is about the native support for SSDs and elimination of long known & trustworthy HDDs. Clearly the sign of things happening!!

Youtube's GoogleChrome Channel has 5 new videos on the Chrome OS.

http://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome

Also at the same time, there seems to be live blogging sessions happening on the "Google Chrome OS" Event:

* Live Webcast: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20091119_chrome_os_...

* Looks like TechCrunch is covering the event, best: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/19/chrome-os-event/

* Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-os/

* Danny Sullivan: http://searchengineland.com/liveblogging-the-google-chrome-o...

True. Have a look at chromiumos.git, ibus, login_manager.git , pam_google.git, syslinux.git and kernel.git

The original infochimps blog post is at http://blog.infochimps.org/2009/11/11/twitter-census-publish...

Seems there is very interesting info out there:

* The packaged data was contains almost the entire history of Twitter: 35 million users, one billion relationships, and half a billion Tweets, reaching back to March 2006.

* the first dataset has # Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour by hour basis.

* the second dataset contains @ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from - 1 Billion relations making what the company calls a "conversation metric."

From the Tech Talk PDF, it is mentioned that Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike started the project in late 2007. Ian Lance Taylor and Russ Cox joined in 2008.

And the goal, as they mention, seems to have the efficiency of a statically-typed compiled language with the ease of programming of a dynamic language but with -

Safety: type-safe and memory-safe.

Good support for concurrency and communication.

Efficient, latency-free garbage collection.

High-speed compilation.

They are aiming at a lightweight type system with no implicit conversions and no more 0x80ULL.

A good starting point is their FAQ page and also the tech talk at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s

One Definition:

"the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment"

It's not a Fibonacci series and it's not a prime number series. It might be the second three denominations of U.S paper currency, but it's not. (Yes, Virginia, there is a U.S. $2 bill.)

Instead, it's a measure of the potential impact and uptake (or lack thereof) of new technologies.

To see why, let's move from the abstract to the concrete, considering when new technologies gain credence.

Aptly summarized by Huxley's quote from the text:

"Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them"

POPTECH

I loved reading Robert Kanigel's biography - "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan." Recommended for people who want to know more about the genius mathematician.