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dundun

97 karma · joined May 29, 2009

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dundun··on Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns?
I'm going to fight tooth and nail when someone calls NYC unsafe, but it's going to be very difficult to argue against the store closings because of theft (as at least one factor).

I've personally witnessed three blatant thefts in the last few years from my local Duane Reade (that closed down in April). Every time the clerks are like "pretty sure that was the same guy from yesterday". It's never violent or scary. It's just like watching a fight between homeless people in a subway station -- you look, think that's odd, and move on.

> Where in NY are these stores closing? 4 different pharmacies that have closed down since the pandemic just on my path to work, including two a stone's throw from the NY stock exchange. https://maps.app.goo.gl/fJcHCgjVacP5pEuHA https://maps.app.goo.gl/kmDXnjHruMCvS2CA6

I suspect it's not all shrinkage though. I imagine continued trends where we buy more and more things via online retailers like Amazon and the growth of online/by mail pharmacies has contributed too. CVS/Duane Reade are still opening new locations too, so it can't be all that bad.

dundun··on Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source
This is the biggest one: https://feast.dev/
dundun··on Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source
How does this relate to Zipline and Bighead? Does it replace those projects or is it a continuation of them?
dundun··on Winning a hackathon, losing my sanity
There's a ton of dunning-kruger going on, but I think as college kids riding a high of winning a contest and learning a ton, it can be excused.
dundun··on Meta to release open-source commercial AI model
Google opensourced Tensorflow because they believed it would help with the hiring process: if researchers could use the same framework to do their PhDs as Google used in their production systems, that was seen as an advantage.

Maybe that's Meta's play here? Maybe the idea is that the ecosystem around a model could be as valuable or more valuable than the model itself too, so an OSS model could benefit Meta a lot more by gaining more of the ecosystem mind share?

Or Maybe Yann LeCun is just a hippie that dreams of free love, hard drugs and open-source models?

dundun··on How Spotify ran a large Google Dataflow job for Wrapped 2019
There was also a breaking story about Google acquiring Spotify on the exact same date a year later!
dundun··on Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System
You certainly can use a db for an event source. This article does a really good job of explaining how: http://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out...

As mentioned in the post, we've pushed Kafka to at least 700,000 events per second. We have room to push it to much more, but stay in tune for post 2 and 3 to see what we're doing instead.

dundun··on Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
Nothing in this move should affect contributions of Snakebite and Luigi. If anything, it will just make them easier to use with cloud environments in addition to bare metal.

With over 20K jobs/day, Hadoop will be a part of Spotify's data processing stack for quite a while. BigQuery is just a (awesome) piece of the full puzzle.

[spotifier]

dundun··on Petuum, a distributed machine learning framework
Browsing through the code, this looks a bit rough around the edges and untested. I'd wonder how it compares to similar packages for Spark, Hadoop or Flink. Lack of numbers and users make me wonder if it's anything more than someone's PhD project at CMU.
dundun··on On the Death of Map-Reduce at Google
MR is actually growing at Google still and heavily used by legacy systems and experienced engineers.

Compared to newer frameworks like those described in the FlumeJava and MillWheel papers, MR's growth is flat.

This is also happening in the Hadoop ecosystem too: if you're writing JavaMR by hand, you're probably spending more time and writing less efficient jobs than what you might get by an optimized pig/hive job with tez under the hood. Or through something in the Cascading or Crunch family, which provides useful abstractions on top of MR or other execution engines.

Then there are also a lot of tools popping up that take some if the use cases that were shoehorned into MR which are more natural outside, like ML/iterative computation through Spark.

MR isn't dying inside or outside Google, it's just being abstracted away.

dundun··on Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
What is missed in the article and many of these comments is that Hadoop isn't always going the best tool for one job. It shines in its multitenancy- when many users are running many jobs-each developed in their favorite framework or language(bash/awk pipeline? No problem) running over datasets bigger than single machines can handle.

It also comes in handy when your dataset grows dramatically in size.

dundun··on Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
Then you're hardly using commodity hardware anymore. While jobs like that probably actually work on Hadoop, I'd imagine a problem like that might be better suited for specialized systems.
dundun··on Airbnb closes $500M round of funding at a $10B valuation, led By TPG
A possible way to look at Airbnb is that they have 200k properties and 200k contractors that get paid a percentage of the revenue they generate.

They aren't in the hotel business, they're marketers and matchmakers.

dundun··on Beets – Command-line music manager and auto-tagger
Sorry, I should have clarified that comment before posting it.

Many bands allow audience taping but I'm not aware of m?any that allow for commercial distribution of those recordings. If Spotify attempted to distribute those recordings against the bands' policies then it would probably piss off the bands.

That Danny Schmidt is pretty great stuff. You're right about Spotify's lack of content when it comes to stuff like this-- they have all his studio albums but are kind of weak when it comes to live stuff, they have one album. Archive.org definitely fills in this gap (I use it all the time for Dead shows).

dundun··on Beets – Command-line music manager and auto-tagger
I've heard the p2p stuff is going away on the desktop app, but you could easily get around it by using the webplayer or mobile app. AFAIK, there's no way to limit the upload speed in the current desktop implementation (in the app).

The content is generally pretty good but they depend on the artists/labels getting it into aggregators or making it available. Bootlegs won't be there because that would probably piss the bands off.

dundun··on Apache Spark: The Next Big Data Thing?
We've been using it on HDP2 for about a month now. Everything works fairly well and it was super easy to setup because of YARN (and the work the Spark team put in).
dundun··on Google to Acquire Nest
They have a widget on the Nest store (https://widgets.nest.com/en/calculator/widget) that estimates energy savings. According to that, a $250/year savings is possible in SF with electric heating and a house over 2000 square feet. Though, the range they provide probably means:

a) It is a historically cold year for a prolonged period of time

b) You set your heat to 80F all the time

With gas heating, it looks almost impossible to save $250... unless you're heating an NBA arena.

dundun··on Facebook's AI lab
He switched it up to torch last year (framework built on top of lua).

I don't think the Neural Net library was quiet what it was in Lush, but it was getting there.

dundun··on Facebook's AI lab
Yann deals with Machine Learning. His specialty (simplified) was pattern recognition in images (first handwriting then objects).

I'd imagine projects that group similar topics (i.e. these people are all in front of the Great Pyramids or these people are all taking pictures of their babies) which probably will help group/filter content

dundun··on Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News
Apple contents that it actually doesn't spend money for most of the placements: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...

I suppose you could put a monetary value on the free giveaways or horse trading that gets done though.

dundun··on Show HN: 5000 best movies
Best movies(and TV shows) by decade (top 100 in parens):

  < 1910:       4 (0)
  1911-1920:    7 (0)
  1921-1930:   48 (0)
  1931-1940:  123 (4)
  1941-1950:  168 (8)
  1951-1960:  243 (10)
  1961-1970:  297 (5)
  1971-1980:  362 (13)
  1981-1990:  583 (7)
  1991-2000: 1030 (21)
  2001-2010: 1937 (27)
  2011-Now:   198 (5)
dundun··on New Apple maps app under fire from users
Apple's decision to go with an in-house map app has been a long time coming. They've been acquiring mapping companies for the last few years and have been (attempting) to build that core competency so that these kind of issues were minimal when they made the switch.

As far as Google giving them turn-by-turn capabilities-- that's really the special sauce that sets Android apart. It was probably available, but at a price that Apple didn't want to pay. Plus, Apple probably didn't like that they weren't getting their 30% on the revenue from local search in the Google Maps app.

So, in the long run this will work out for Apple. Sure, the users will be affected in the short term and it may never actually be as good as Google Maps.... but hey look, shiny pictures of 3D buildings

dundun··on New Data Science Certificate Program
BigDataUniversity (http://bigdatauniversity.com/) also has free courses and cover hadoop and some other stuff.

The site appears to be push sponsor products and don't really talk about alternatives. Expect to see lots of endorsements of IBM products.

dundun··on Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes
I disagree. His post stands as a public review of his previous employer, which-- in giving him the bonus after they previously denied it-- admit that they have two very different personalities. In the public, they are good people and agree with the morals of the multitudes (doing the right thing). In private, they abuse their power and finger point when things don't go their way (he "lost their data and mangled their company).

It wasn't worth 10K to Miso. Potential employees are going to google their name and want nothing to do with them. I sure wouldn't.

Their might be some employers that deny J Wu a job based on an honest post like this, but are they really working for in the first place?

dundun··on Impressive SOPA blackout
Phish.net is also using it. I saw your name in the source and was wondering if you were affiliated with that site or this was a widespread thing.

Anyway, great work.

dundun··on Senator Marco Rubio drops support for PIPA
Roy Blunt, Senator from Missouri, has also dropped support: https://twitter.com/#!/RoyBlunt/status/159698998578524160

Politicians are getting the message (which to them, may just be that dropping support is a quick and easy way to gain popularity with its younger constituents)

dundun··on ATT dumps Kevin Mitnick
It's probably just a business decision. (assumption)They can provide cell phone service for 1000 people for the same cost as Mitnick since he is a target.

It's the same thing Sprint did a couple years ago when they dumped people that called customer service too much.

dundun··on Judge: Microsoft can't sell Word anymore
I think it is because nobody believes it will actually force MSFT to stop shipping word. And with a market cap of 200+ billion, a payout to i4i wouldn't hurt MSFT too much.
dundun··on [dead]
It'll work until the sites that require logins go here and disable any user names they find.

I like this clause in the TOS, I'm sure it will make a huge difference:

# If you are an owner, employee, partner, affiliate or representative (legal or otherwise) of any site which enforces compulsory user registration then you are forbidden from accessing any resource of this site. Failure to comply constitutes unauthorized access