jfasi

On the go: a Samsung Chromebook 550, so the old version of the $250 model. I use this to SSH into my development server, which consists of a series two Raspberry Pi.

I keep my old 15 inch MacBook pro around for TF2 and to run more involved deployments on VMs.

That seems like a high salary. What's your title?

That is a beautiful website. Is it custom, or is it something I can install myself? Feel free to refuse to answer :P

I'm not sure I understand. Could you please elaborate?

Thanks for saying this. I'm an early twenty's kid who's decided to forgo the fashionable startup scene in favor of an extremely well-paid (given my age) position in a top-ten tech giant. I have a hunch that it would be more sensible to sharpen my skills when I'm young, and focus on becoming a happy and fulfilled person, only to emerge as a powerhouse of compounded experience and technical and social skill.

As someone who's already emerged on the other side of that process, can you speak to one's capability to capitalize on that experience and personal growth throughout one's life? Does middle age have to be a time of complacency and conservatism?

Checkmate, bitcoin doubters!

There is in fact a SWE 1 title, but it's reserved for interns.

If there's nothing you can do about it, and no discernible consequences (we'd all cease to exist if it were to happen) why get upset?

This article does raise interesting points, and Nate Silver does stretch the power of Bayesian statistics a little bit. However, the crux of his argument for Bayesian statistics is that it provides a process by which we can approach truth asymptotically.

The beautiful thing about bayesian probability is that the first experiments conditional probability is the next experiment's bayesian prior. We acknowledge the epistemological fact that our initial understanding of the world is flawed, and correct it from there.

I would suggest an older-generation macbook. Between the excellent hardware build quality and the well-maintained software, they don't become obsolete quickly. I've got enough cash on hand to buy a new laptop several times over, but my old macbook is still going.

If it's battery life you want, then you definitely should go with the macbook air.

I had two internships over two summers, and each one was worth $18k for the duration.

Not sure if this is strictly programming-related, but: Eschewing traditional career-track employment in favor of joining a startup can be damaging, and frequently does not break even with respect to the amount of money and influence you would gain working in a more traditional position.

I find it incredibly amusing that a statement by an experienced businessman who has decided to share some of his hard-earned earned insight into a product is being treated this way. I'm inclined take the opinion of someone who's got his mind on his money and his money on his mind more seriously than a blog post by a social media marketing firm.

Agreed. There is much glamour and flash on display on this site that people seem to forget that failure is what teaches you things, not success.

New York is going to be the second choice here, I think. The culture is certainly a little different in terms of VCs and the sorts of companies that take up residence there, but it's a great place to be.

After that, having spent a good length of time in Boston, I can say that there is a small but very healthy startup community there.

Is it just me, or wouldn't it be fairly trivial for a troublesome country to just point a satellite at Iran and give citizens access that way?

> Pointer arithmetic I have always heard of pointer arithmetic but now I understand why it’s so useful. Taking a pointer to the first element in an array and incrementing it to iterate through it’s elements is elegant and more efficient than taking an integer i and using it as an array index. I wish more languages afforded this.

Trust me, no you don't. Pointer arithmetic is one of the easiest things to screw up in C, and the raw form can be very dangerous to work with.

For sure, treating a pointer as an integer and incrementing by a fixed number of bytes each time is fine, but more often than not languages have this implemented, just as a JIT or compiler optimization.

Where are you located? If you're in NYC, I'm a new hire there now.

I am insulted by the smugness of this post. Firstly, the pretension that tech journalists have any reason whatsoever to be reading this blog. Secondly, the lack of any evidence, enforcement, or argument as to why "journalists don't know what they are talking about."

Thirdly, the notion that all you need to be a tech journalist is an understanding of programming, when technology journalism today touches on hardware, electrical engineering, business, politics, environmental issues, and finance, not to mention the fact that many of these people are actually trained journalists, which is a worthy field by itself.

However, the most damning implication, the one which tends to lie at the root of many self-delusional blogs beyond this one: the idea that only insiders' word is worth hearing. Only an insider in a very particular segment of the tech world will be able to immediately tell you which of the NoSQL databases is the odd man out.

The notion that someone who can't isn't worth listening to is a surefire way to seal yourself in a stifling echo chamber where you cling to your own (usually flawed) ideas like a teenager clinging to a safety blanket while the other kids are out making friends and growing.

It's telling that the author hasn't received an offer for a free copy of PRC's product.

Think about it: the author writes touching human interest story that pulls at readers' heartstrings by genuinely presenting the dilemma he is faced with. The story resonates with the combined holy trinity of geek social news: "Apple is a soulless and evil," "The patent system is a parasite on the world," and "Indie game/software developers are sacrosanct." Outrage ensues.

What could make this all go away for PRC? Apologizing and offering the author a free copy of their product before he decides to launch a crusade and a PR nightmare. Instead, no such offer came through.

The question I want answered is, Why? Are these companies so clueless that they don't see the PR catastrophe brewing? Do they know and don't care?

I propose a teaching about the nature of social news in the form of an admittedly unlikely third explanation: The company performed a cost-benefit analysis and realized that the intersection of this blog's audience and the company's customer base is so small they can get away with ignoring them.

Your outrage is impotent. You can rage about this on the internet all you want, but it's not going to cause an inch of motion in any direction. If you want to do something other than express frustration, send letters to newspapers, don't post comments. These companies are going to have to lead marketing campaigns. Get the jump on them and make the first impression on their potential customers.

That is how you get things done.

My favorite thing is when the answer to the security question is allowed to be remembered by the browser, meaning anyone who gets my password can saunter up to any computer I've used in the past and bypass the stupid security question.

The foundation of a new legal entity for open source is not any sort of magnanimous move on the part of Microsoft. It is a standard maneuver in companies wishing to take advantage of open source projects: create a separate company just to avoid GPL poisoning your products.

And this is perfectly fine. For instance, Qualcomm set up Code Aurora specifically so that they could keep their propriety and open source offerings separate.

The shifty thing here is that Microsoft is trying to paint this as some sort of altruism, as thought Microsoft is doing the open source world a favor by setting up a legal formality.

Wait. We do all realize that you can read the article just by removing the arguments from the address, right?

Well, strictly speaking the Cortex A9 is supposed to be 1mm x 1.5mm, but that's:

1. According to ARM's promotional materials. No corroboration from licensors, as far as I'm aware.

2. Without caches. If you look at those pretty pictures of Intel chips, those huge swatches of regular rectangular stuff are caches, and they take up space.

Well this is interesting.

That's a question I submitted while in the process of researching my final paper for Alfred Aho's advanced compilers course at Columbia University. In the paper, I discuss why compiling Python to C is difficult, and present some of the process that PyPy uses to make the translation happen for RPython.

Here's the link:

http://www.scribd.com/thejfasi/d/83851011-COMS-6998-Final-Pa...

EDIT: The title of this post is slightly misleading. It doesn't discuss how PyPy works, just how the translation framework happens.

This is a good release, however there is a better way to present it.

By now, gasoline powered cars have been around for a hundred years. Everyone knows they are complex machines with lots of movings parts, and that they require regular maintenance to keep in working shape. What Tesla is putting forward here is the fact that the same principle applies to their electric cars: they need their own kind of TLC to be kept in good shape.

However, there is another point Tesla fails to get across. Over those hundred or so years, not only has the need to care of a gas-powered car entered into the public psyche, but also how that care must be carried out. Everyone knows that cars need oil changes and exhaust checks and all that. It's obvious by now.

However, that sort of awareness doesn't exist when it comes to electric cars. Saying they need care is great, but Tesla is missing an opportunity to develop the same sort of intuitive public awareness with regard to their vehicles. It's not just 'these cars need care,' it's 'these cars need care, and its of a kind you don't expect, that's OK because you haven't need raised on these vehicles since you were young.'

This way, the message would move from being an ever-so-slightly condescending implication that you forgot that electric cars need electricity, and refocuses on the need to augment the way in which people think about maintaining their vehicles.

This is exactly what I was afraid of when Steve Jobs died. Apple is starting to go into stupid crap again.

I presume that by Motorola they mean to say Google, right?

I think the reason is both technical and social.

The JVM has a very hard time integrating existing C code and extensions. For instance, in the case of python, Jython lacks the ability to take advantage of the significant number of modules written in C.

Consider what this means for performance. Imagine a pure python module that attempts to import a C submodule for performance, and falls back on on the pure python implementation specifically to allow it to run on non-CPython implementations. json is an example of such a module.

This module was likely engineered and architected with C module optimization in mind. I'd assert that in most cases the pure python module is a crutch to allow a CPython-targeting module to run on other implementations.

This leads into the social reason. Community takes a long time to build and using the JVM for dynamic languages is a relatively new trend. The JVM is a very mature, well-optimied technology for static languages. It is only now that dynamic languages are starting to gain traction on it.