itistoday

Hacker Island, anyone? Or are we too busy/pale-skinned for a tropical island?

It should be located across from Reddit Island though, and smaller. Oh, and everyone on Hacker Island must have a hatchet and a monocle.

Perhaps a cave would be more appropriate.

Good point, but it seems like so far they're only applying a tourniquet, unless I'm mistaken.

A lot of people have mentioned this already, and I see that you're aware, but try to take another look at Lyme disease as a possible candidate. There's a huge controversy over it that I'm sure you're aware of.

If you haven't seen the movie "Under Our Skin", go see it now. It's all about the insanity surrounding Lyme disease, and basically the conclusion is that you need to find yourself a real expert on Lyme disease, and unfortunately they're not easy to find.

  Each core in Knights Corner runs at 1.2GHz, is supported by
  512-bit vector processing units, has 8MB of cache, and four
  threads per core.

That's 200 simultaneous threads. Wow. That's almost like a GPU.

I certainly agree with you, and just to note, even though he puts it in quotes, he wasn't quoting any part of the original post, it was mostly his own invention (a modification of the original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...)

I love this little snarky response to that post:

  "THEY CAME FIRST for the phone app developers,
  and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a phone app developer.
  THEN THEY CAME for the flash developer,
  and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a flash developer.
  THEN THEY CAME for the desktop style app developers,
  and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a desktop style app developer.
  THEN THEY CAME for me
  and by that time no one was left to speak up."
  Yep Godwin was right : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
  Neil Ellis said this on June 1, 2010 at 11:01 pm

That sounds like a good proposal on a definition of intelligence, but it doesn't tell you why someone would be good at predicting something, which is what my point was: that when you try to claim that any one thing is the reason for someone's ability to, in this case, predict something, you're ignoring the multitudes of other reasons that are all interrelated.

No single thing is a "true sign of intelligence", that is to ignore the mutual interdependence of things. You can't have imagination without any knowledge.

There's a hilarious comment really worth reading:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c9iq1/i_am_a_failed_en...

Was I voted down because y'all lack a sense of humor, or was it because you didn't read the article?

Why, they're the future of the web, or haven't you heard? ;-)

Justifying your shortcomings "because everyone else has them" is a recipe for failure, and doesn't get rid of the fact that there's a shortcoming. In this case, a rather significant one.

The article reads like an April fools joke:

  Roof patrols were also being arranged and nets installed 
  around buildings to deter suicidal workers, it added.
  
  "If they jump, they'll fall into the safety nets, so 
  their lives will be saved," a contractor told the channel.

And the surprising bit:

  But there was no shortage of people trying to get through 
  the factory gates. Around 8,000 people apply to work at the 
  factory every day, Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told the 
  state-run China Daily newspaper.

> What I'm trying to say is that the profile of the US (the general symbol of Westernism in Islamic states) is already extremely low. A lot of people consider the US rude and intolerant; that's just the image that has unfortunately developed. Ordinary people in those states are probably looking at this and thinking "well this just proves it doesn't it".

That's odd, I thought this day was about fighting intolerance, not supporting it.

Funny. Intolerance is being used in two diametrically opposed ways here:

1) Can Muslims tolerate other's rights to express themselves?

2) Can Freedom-Of-Speecher's tolerate Muslim's intolerance?

Is tolerating intolerance tolerant or intolerant?

It seems almost like a koan.

I think the truly tolerant person would be very much like a "stoner" here: tolerating both those who draw pictures of Muhammad, and tolerating (read: understanding) the outrage of Muslims. "OK man... I see you're drawing a picture... OK man... I see you're stabbing that other dude..."

That right there is ultimate tolerance. Holding to no belief in other words.

Where do you find yourself?

I feel like this is something Anonymous would be all over. Any activity/response from "them"?

Oddly enough this makes me feel a bit impotent. Here I am playing with my 1's and 0's... like a caveman. :-p

From their whitepaper:

"Conventional databases experience disk and user stalls within transactions. Rather than let the CPU be idle during the stalls, those DBMSs interleave SQL execution from multiple transactions during the waits so the CPU is always busy. This is what requires much of the complex latching and locking overhead.

VoltDB doesn’t experience user stalls (since transactions happen within stored procedures) or disk stalls (because VoltDB processes data in main memory). Therefore, it is able to eliminate the overhead associated with multi-threading (latching) and locking. Each VoltDB execution engine is single-threaded and contains a queue of transaction requests, which it executes sequentially—and exclusively—against its data. Elimination of stalls and the need for locking and latching overhead and allows typical VoltDB SQL operations to complete in microseconds.

For single-partition transactions, each VoltDB engine operates autonomously. For multi-partition transactions, one engine distributes and coordinates work plans for the other engines. VoltDB assumes that an application designer can construct a partitioning/cloning scheme and a transaction design that makes a large majority of the transactions local to a single virtual node. Many common applications such as order-fulfillment, software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and trading systems have this property."

http://www.voltdb.com/_pdf/VoltDBTechnicalOverviewWhitePaper...

> Students don't set the industry standard. They follow it.

There are exceptions to most rules, including this one. Consider for example what has taken place with Blender. I know a lot of people who would have been learning 3DS Max (or Maya, etc.), but now know and use Blender instead because that's what they can afford.

And these students don't have to venture forth into The Industry. They can create their own that will topple the existing one. There are plenty of growing startups who would be more than happy to hire someone with "3D Skillz", and many of them don't care what tools they use, so long as the work gets done.

Agreed. I actually have found that the kind of high I get from caffeine greatly depends on the source it comes from.

For me, coffee is drastically inferior to the high I get from earl grey tea (most black teas in general). I find that with tea the high is much smoother and lasts longer; if you can imagine a bell curve, it would be wider and with a smaller amplitude, whereas coffee would be narrower and with a taller amplitude.

Also, I've found a 20 minute nap at mid-day with green tea afterwards (about half the caffeine content of my morning breakfast tea) to be much more effective in improving cognitive performance than to skip the nap and rely solely on caffeine. For the rest of the day I'm caffeine free.

</personal-experience-disclaimer>

Because if every lecture was that way, then that style would be the norm, and therefore almost by definition you probably wouldn't be engaged, just as you aren't engaged to the norm now, and seek out unique and interesting—novel things.

+1

Though I'm struggling to think of even just one example of a human-created ecosystem designed to substitute for a natural one that's been at least as sustainable as those existing in nature.

  Using the newer sys_epoll system call with Knot avoids this
  problem and achieves excellent scalability. However, we 
  have used the poll() result for comparison, since sys_epoll
  is incompatible with Haboob's socket library.

WTH? I admit I didn't read the entire thing (just skimmed), but are they actually comparing threads to poll() and declaring victory instead of epoll()? Intentionally? epoll() is radically different from poll(). Nobody uses poll() for heavy-duty event-based servers. They might as well not have said anything at all.

A bit disappointed. I thought this was a cleverly disguised post related to Doctor Who...

Sure, I understand, but I don't think my question was crude. I agree it's important to understand the principles.

I understand the basic idea of how Clojure's data structures work with STM and how they're immutable and how a "new" data structure is created upon mutation without copying the old one. But that understanding isn't helping me.

I don't understand Cliff's version well enough to be able to perform benchmarks in my head, nor do I understand either of the data structures well enough to understand the principles (as you said) to know when to pick one over the other.

So you said that when thread-count > 1000 I should pick Cliff's? Is it that simple? I would suspect not. What if there's only 2 threads involved? I'd just like a generalized overview of which is better for what types of situations, and by all means, to understand the "why" of it would be great too.

Or is the idea that because Cliff's version is mutable and does the whole "conflating state w/identity" thing, that it has no place in Clojure at all?

OK, but let me restate my question then:

Does Cliff's approach result in a faster hash table than Clojure's? Is it "better"? In some situations or in all? If so, which?

When would you want to use Cliff's instead of Clojure's built in one? Would you at all?

I see. The App Store is a private art gallery.

Stop kidding yourself.

How does this compare to Clojure's approach?

> So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.

There's the conflict. Your art's success depends on the ability of others to say the same exact thing, in a symbiosis with your art.

Does it not go against the very spirit of art itself to tell other artists that they must paint your way?

OK, so are you saying he has these kinds of debates at Apple with his fellow coworkers and then goes home and continues to have the same debates at 1AM with the rest of the world? Instead of doing... anything else?

I'm willing to believe that as a possibility. As in physically possible. You don't find that at least a little surprising though? Really?

I don't recall doing any of that, sorry if my comments made that impression.