jkbyc

I can't speak for myself (yet) but some successful bloggers such as Ramit Sethi or Derek Halpern recommend spending even 50% or more time promoting the content you write. But that's of course only one part of the whole equation. One should make sure first that someone will actually want to read that content - i.e. do a lot of upfront research.

I can confirm. I discovered this fact very quickly when I was looking for a flat in Munich in 2009. Almost no replies to emails, I got a pretty good response rate when I called or texted the people. I spoke some German so getting a viewing wasn't that complicated but the competition was big - sometimes tens of people queuing to view the apartment when I got there and I could tell they would typically prefer a German person over a Czech guy speaking imperfect German.

Reversing the problem is also a good idea, I know some people had success buying an ad in Sueddeutsche Zeitung. At one point I also put up printed ads in supermarkets in the areas I was considering and while the response rate was very low, I got at least some response.

There are also some agencies that in fact own flats and rent them without requiring the 2.5 x rent fee.

Which language have you moved to?

Well, I never was much concerned about UI/desktop visions and philosophies. Maybe I am missing out on something, I don't know. I like that Gnome Shell goes pretty much out of my way most of the time and works for me without tweaking, without bloat and is intuitive enough (plus I like its rudimentary support of window tiling). I agree with other people commenting here - I simply want to get my work done and don't care much about else, I especially don't care how well it works with touch screens - I don't have any use for that.

On the other hand, the persistent sessions/activities in KDE someone mentioned sound intriguing.

What did you switch to?

Alt-Tab works perfectly fine for me in Gnome Shell (I was initially annoyed by Alt+` to switch windows within a program group but now I find it useful). I find the app overview also clear and very usable. And it's nice that it's JavaScript-based so I can tweak some minor things easily (hot corner on external monitors).

For Unity I'm probably simply not in the target group, I don't like it.

I left KDE many years ago because I found it buggy and bloated. Maybe it's time to give it a look but I'm happy with my Gnome Shell (in a very nearly out of the box configuration).

I didn't realize that Mono doesn't do Silverlight. Now I read they refer to it as a separate project: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Thanks

That makes sense, thanks

Any time I wanted to use mono it didn't work. It wasn't many times though. A couple of times to try a FPS game and also for some sites based on Silverlight. I'm wondering if it is usable now or what's the common use case for it for which it works fine.

I can assure you that people in eastern Europe, the Czech republic at least, also do complain about having their nice new bikes stolen. Just to put things into perspective, eastern EU is not some wild west.

The best text I've read about backpropagation is in "Neural Networks: A Systematic Introduction" by Raul Rojas [1]

He uses a nice graphical approach that is easily understandable yet formal. It's been many years since I've read it to learn for an exam at university but I remember it was an enjoyable read and I wished I had more time to spend on the book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Neural-Networks-A-Systematic-Introduct...

Many alternative shells popping up recently. Someone already mentioned the Fish shell [1] in this thread. There is also Xiki [2] and its recent Kickstarter campaign [3].

[1] http://fishshell.com/ [2] http://xiki.org/ [3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/xiki/xiki-the-command-r...

A comprehensive list of them is at http://nosql-database.org/ a comparison matrix of Mongo, Couch, Dynamo, HBase, Cassandra, Accumulo, Redis, Riak, Neo4j: http://www.infoivy.com/2013/07/nosql-database-comparison-cha...

There is so many of them that I doubt there is a good resource comparing them. I think it's best to start comparing the various models (document store vs column store vs key-value store vs graph db vs rdbms, ...) and then look for detailed comparisons of the implementations of the model.

There is a lot of hype around many of them, but a lot has already been debunked too, esp. here.

For example I personally would have picked PostgreSQL rather than Mongo in some cases in past when Mongo was pushed on me by people who's understanding didn't go beyond the hype.

Maybe describe your problem in more detail here and perhaps you'll get useful feedback? Maybe Ask HN? Feel free to drop me a line.

I don't think you have to or should stress in your CV that you intend to go back and do a PhD.

From a recruiter's point of view being a PhD dropout might be even better because it could mean that you won't go back and you will stay being productive where they hired you after they invest in training you the first couple of months/a year.

I'd leave it open ended. In practice, it's just your plan, it's not a given, it can change based on many things. If they ask you, you can explain that it wasn't a good match and that you may or may not try again but right now you want industry experience. You could sell it as wanting to do practical, useful, not ivory tower things which could possibly in the longer term give you a better idea what would be worthwhile research if you ever decide to go back.

Garbage collection is quite similar to view maintenance in databases (or more specifically reason maintenance / truth maintenance). Especially the fact that they found a least fix-point formulation of the problem hints at strong similarity with computing and maintaining fixpoints in deductive databases - that is computing and maintaining materialized views from some base facts and rules (a distinction that does not need to be made; base facts can be seen as special kinds of rules).

In view maintenance, there are various counting algorithms known since around 30 years - for example the PF (Propagate and Filter) algorithm, or DRed (derive-rederive) algorithm. One difference is that in garbage collection you always have the whole graph: edges and vertices, while in view maintenance you typically have only the vertices. That gives rise to the "proof traces" method of view/reason maintenance where you build up the whole graph and keep the edges even though they are useful only for maintenance (or for explanation).

The distinction of tracing garbage collection vs. reference counting garbage collection could be also seen as sort of analogous to the difference between forward chaining and backward chaining in datalog or rule systems in general.

It seems like another case where bigger awareness of results from different but related fields could help to bear fruit much faster. This paper in particular seems like something that could have been inspired by the old view maintenance research. Maybe there still are some opportunities left for transferring results from one of the fields to the other.

Feynman did some interesting work on computers - he used his fine physics-trained calculus skills to analyze a chip and message passing - a discrete system:

> By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

> The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

> Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

  Location: Ireland, hoping to relocate (lived in Germany and Czech republic)
  Remote: yes, preferred
  Willing to relocate: yes
  Technologies: hadoop, solr, elasticsearch, play framework, java, automated reasoning. Would love to do more AI, machine learning, haskell
  Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=703594
  Twitter: @jkbkot

Looking around for the next challenge, would love to work remotely with a motivated, ambitious team.

I don't see any jobs in Prague in the list, am I looking wrong?

Also, I have background in (research) AI, reasoning, semantic web, and experience (software engineering) around hadoop and search/information retrieval, (education): machine learning, medical informatics, biology of the cell. I see many possible matches in the US-based jobs. Is there an option for a broader application where you would suggest a good match?

Would it be possible to perform some of the roles offered for US in continental Europe or truly remotely?

It's even already implemented as the Hacker News UX extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn...

I like it a lot, it would be great to have it that way by default.

I didn't know that awk and Perl are so closely related, thanks!

Knowing bash, sed (single-line), grep quite well, I still regularly run into problems (mostly multiline complex regex substitutions I guess) where I could use a more expressive or more efficient tool. I am thinking that I should perhaps invest in learning AWK. But then, why not go all the way and learn Perl? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

It also does some shady things to increase engagement. I sent a Quora link to a friend, she created an account to be able to read it and the next day I got an email from Quora that she followed me (it also said that she is already following four other people). In reality, she did nothing. She just read the article, didn't follow anyone.

Good to see more games coming to Linux, even though I game only rarely. They forgot to mention also Carmageddon:Reincarnation, funded by Kickstarter, now already available on Steam in preview for Windows, and should be coming to Linux later as well! One of the few games that I'm really looking forward to :)

I've seen that some people have success with getting accountability partners. You meet once a week, review progress on goals from the last week, set 3 goals for the next week and keep on going.

Now, where to find such partners - that can be a matter of networking, but online communities such as http://www.reddit.com/r/mentors/ can certainly help.

You could have a look at the various entrepreneurial schools and their communities, recently I've stumbled upon http://www.morningcoach.com/ ... I have no idea what it is and how it works but there are some interesting testimonials online (I believe not faked), etc.

There's a nice movie that touches the topics of addiction, dependence and dreams: The Congress (2013): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/

I thought so too first but then I read Trevor Perrin's response to Lars Eggert: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03778.h... and it seems quite clear that Eggert failed to consider a number of important aspects, just one example from Perrin's mail:

> So unlike the title "co-chair" might imply, and unlike in many other organizations, IRTF co-chairs are little more than group secretaries.

The chair is far more than a "group secretary". As RFC 2014 section 5.3 states:

""" The Research Group Chair is concerned with making forward progress in the areas under investigation, and has wide discretion in the conduct of Research Group business. [...] The Chair has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that a Research Group achieves forward progress. """

It's also very readable by displaying the source code of the page.

You've already gave us background on who Trevor Perrin is.

Could someone shed a bit more light on who Dan Harkins is? He seems to be quite arrogant and does not address Trevor Perrin's criticism very constructively. See the other two threads started by Trevor:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03545.h... (Question regarding CFRG process)

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03537.h... (Review of Dragonfly PAKE)

Thanks, that sheds a bit more light on it.

To me it still sounds like "I solved the problem because I formalized it." The formalization is probably novel (since he got his PhD for it) but somehow I find it difficult to believe noone else had a similar idea before (it definitely sounds familiar to me having learned about reinforcement learning, minimum description length, etc. before). I'll have to read up on it.

How is this better than applying the minimum description length principle formalization of Occam's razor? (from 1978 [1])

I admit that I didn't spend time to really delve into it but nothing in this article strikes me as particularly ground breaking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length

edit: innovative --> ground breaking

I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.