Adrock

Here's my Wes Clark story...

About 6 years ago I went to his Brooklyn apartment for his birthday. I had never heard of him, but he's distant cousins with my wife's step father and we lived nearby. We get to his apartment and I start looking at the book collection... a lot of interesting math and computer science.

I started talking with him 1 on 1 and at some point he drops that he created the first personal computer. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the back of my mind I was thinking "oh boy, this guy's not all there." But then he took me to his office and there's a poster of him with the LINC and I'm realizing that I've hit the motherlode of awesome computing history from a primary source.

He then showed me his current project: a working model Broadway stage for his granddaughter. It had to-scale working versions of everything, including the lights and actual mechanisms for drawing the curtains. Then he fired up his Mac with a 30" monitor and showed me that every piece had been laser cut from schematics that he had designed. In raw postscript. The entire thing was programmatically generated from a massive postscript program that was fully parameterized so he could change the dimensions of anything single component and the whole stage would be regenerated.

That programmatic modeling project was a big motivation for the work I've been doing to make parameterized 3d models for ergonomic keyboards (https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard).

I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old flying around vim editing postscript. It was a trip and it was really inspiring to see someone his age still hacking.

This defamatory story probably wasn't meant to be defamatory.

That makes more sense.

There's a lot of context that made me assume you were talking about stumping them on technical questions. This is Hacker News and the topic of how to do technical interviews is a frequent focus.

They may not be getting paid that much because they can answer your "stumpers." You might be better served by using the interview to find out why they add so much value instead of trying to prove that you're superior in some way.

I'll just assume that the answer to the question is expressed in points it earned.

How many lines were tests?

Check out the author's blog post where he explains his motivation: http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/

That was my initial reading, too. Further searching for the CORTEX project revealed that it's probably an internal accounting system.

Sorry, I wish there was an epic mash-up of non-misogynistic tracks, but this is what I've got to work with.

Nice! I hadn't seen that before.

I just finished up this project... any feedback would be appreciated!

Here's how to make this with MathJax:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/11/29/colorful-equations/

Yeah, that's why in the original submission I had "(by Josh Bloch)" appended to the title. HN mods removed it.

This annotation:

http://meta.genius.com/4127010

That picture of Bruges is from Seeing Like a State[1], which should be required reading for all managers.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300078153/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

It is possible to switch the switches on the Kinesis to Cherry MX blues, but it is a lot of work:

http://t.co/OyjGCdwvGN

That said, it is awesome (and loud).

Even though I know it's a dupe, I'll upvote it every time.

I've been doing a lot of 3D modeling recently and have wanted to sign my work, so I added text rendering to the Clojure library I've been using:

https://twitter.com/adereth/status/457217237313925120/photo/...

Learned a bit about font rendering and Java's awt packages.

> First, Wall Street's role in capital markets towers over Silicon Valley. Venture Capital Assets Under Management is approximately $200 billion. Blackrock, the world's largest fund, has $4.3 trillion AUM.

This isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Most of the money managed by the big players like Blackrock is in funds that are tied to specific benchmarks and have very restrictive mandates. Relatively little of it can be redirected towards funding new companies.

I did an analysis of Mathematica benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi and found it to be 15x slower at best and much slower when there are CPU specific optimizations:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/01/06/benchmarking-mathem...

It's not obvious to me that what you describe is a better way. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive and what I described is not about charitable contributions. It's about actual business processes and business decisions, which are difficult to argue should be made using votes.

Another take is that these kind of sustainable practices are desirable to Apple's high-value employees. By acting in a way that increases the retention of those employees and helps with recruiting new ones with similar priorities, they are investing in the company's future.

I just did a build and sourced all the parts myself. It actually doesn't end up being much more than the Massdrop kit.

OP here... here's my reply from the comments:

Yep, I'm aware of the Church-Turing thesis and the relationship between TM and the Lambda Calculus. I originally had a mention of it, but I removed it because I was really more focused on the RegEx -> CFG -> ? chain and I couldn't find anything that made that connection with the Lambda Calculus. Any sources that make that connection would be appreciated!

OP here. I didn't realize that Clojure was a trigger word! I just included that bit at the beginning to give a little context on how I got into this topic, not to hype anything.

"Open Compute is an initiative that Facebook started three years ago to help big computing centers add the kind of cost cuts and efficiency gains that open-source software — where programmers share ideas and code across company, university and even national boundaries — to single computer servers and Web management.

If that sounds technical, you’re right."

I've read that first sentence 10 times and I'm still not sure how it parses as English.

I like Randall Hyde's style:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Assembly-Language-Randall-Hyde/dp/...

Back when I was working on PE problems, I had a spreadsheet of the problems and I'd sort them by the ratio of solvers to solvers of the preceding problem. It's a handy way to find the low hanging fruit and partially eliminates the recency factor.

This takes me back to freshman year of CS at CMU. Steven Rudich showed up to the freshman seminar wearing a chef costume and spent an hour explaining the problem to give us a taste of 15-251. Picture here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rudich/

I did a quick write-up of the top packages from the survey with brief descriptions of what they are and links to their respective Emacs Wiki pages:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-ena...

OP here. I was waiting for that :P