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jparise

1,752 karma · joined June 19, 2008

https://www.indelible.org/
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jparise··on Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" by Edwin A. Abbott.

> Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

jparise··on Utah expands public transportation with rapid bus transit, free until 2021
AC Transit is building out a BRT line in the East Bay between Oakland and San Leandro.

http://www.actransit.org/brt/

jparise··on User-defined Order in SQL
At Pinterest, we expanded the precision of our existing timestamp-based sequence column to accommodate reordering:

https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/how-we-built-rearr...

jparise··on Startup Graveyard – History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself
Seeing this prompted me to revisit http://thecan.org/, "a pet cemetery for dead games."
jparise··on Erlang on Xen
Also check out the instance-per-request demo: http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/
jparise··on HTTPie: A cURL-like tool for humans
I'd also recommend Curlish (http://packages.python.org/curlish/). It performs nice JSON highlighting and also handles OAuth 2.0 token authentication.

It simply wraps curl(1), so all of the familiar arguments and recipes continue to work just fine, as well.

jparise··on What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies
Mike gave a great talk to the San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group in which he discussed their PostgreSQL setup.

Slides: http://media.postgresql.org/sfpug/instagram_sfpug.pdf

Video: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/21929154

jparise··on Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater
It's also fun to remember that all of the Apollo moon landings took place during just a 3.5 year period in the middle of the Nixon administration.
jparise··on John Nash's Letter to the NSA
"I hope my handwriting, etc. do not give the impression I am just a crank or circle-squarer."

It seems he considered how a handwritten letter might be perceived.

jparise··on Python URL manipulation made simple.
I wrote a similar Python library (named yuri) a couple of months back: https://github.com/jparise/yuri

I was motivated to write it in response to one of Quora's Programming Challenges (http://www.quora.com/about/challenges). It seemed like a fun problem, and I had never had a good reason to read through the applicable RFCs. I wonder if furl was similarly motivated?

I don't find the standard library modules very difficult to use, however, so I haven't spent much more time on it since then.

jparise··on Voyager 2 to Switch to Backup Thruster Set
"Collectively, the RTGs supply the spacecraft with 470 watts at launch and will allow operations to continue until at least 2020."
jparise··on The beginnings of a BSD licensed bignum library
The code hasn't been updated in about a year: https://github.com/wbhart/bsdnt

The author appears to be planning a restart of the project, but that won't happen until next year: http://wbhart.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html

jparise··on Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone
The Iconfactory is credited in the (new?) "About" screen.
jparise··on Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers)
Thanks. I should have done a more thorough search before submitting this. I was honestly surprised that this particularly link hadn't been posted before, and now we see that this paper has nearly a half-dozen URIs on the same site. Bummer.
jparise··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (October 2011)
San Francisco, CA (SOMA) - Booyah!

We're a mobile games company that focuses on using real-world elements (e.g. location) as part of our entertainment experiences. We're primarily focused on iOS development right now, but we have a lot of cross-platform (Android, Flash, Mac, PC, etc.) experience in-house as well.

We're the game studio that brought you MyTown, Early Bird, DJ Rivals, and Nightclub City.

We're current looking for gameplay engineers (http://www.booyah.com/jobs/?id=41) and a senior systems engineer (http://www.booyah.com/jobs/?id=37).

We're a Mac shop. Our code lives in git. Jenkins keeps us honest. Engineers use whatever other tools they prefer.

We also have business, project management, and art openings: http://www.booyah.com/jobs/

jparise··on Surprises from numerical linear algebra (2010)
Khan Academy has a complete Linear Algebra section: http://www.khanacademy.org/#linear-algebra
jparise··on Key slides from Winston Churchill's war time speeches
This is reminiscent of Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address Powerpoint presentation (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/).
jparise··on Peter Norvig on a 45-year-old article about a checkers-playing program
Here's the accompanying source code: http://norvig.com/sciam/checkers.py

  There are four parts to this program:
  (1) Strachey's checkers program in CPL:
      OriginalCPLprogram is the original program, verbatim
      ModifiedCPLprogram fixes a typo and two small conceptual problems
  (2) A parser for the CPL language.  This is encoded in the external
      file 'cpl.g', which is then processed by yapps2.py to produce cpl.py,
      which we then import, allowing us to use cpl.parse on ModifiedCPLprogram.
  (3) Functions described but not implemented by Strachey (such as Null and Shift).
  (4) Variable definitions and functions not listed by Strachey.
  (5) Test cases.
jparise··on JStat: Statistical JavaScript Library
Direct link to the jStat site: http://www.jstat.org/

  jStat is a statistical library written in JavaScript that allows you
  to perform advanced statistical operations without the need of a
  dedicated statistical language (i.e. MATLAB or R).
jparise··on WSGI Is Dead: Long Live WSGI Lite
Another way to look at it is as an adapter to a "new" WSGI interface specification. The fact that it's backwards compatibile allows it to be used with existing WSGI tools, but future WSGI Lite-compatible software could implement the Lite API directly.

That being said, I've only briefly looked over the WSGI Lite code and neither advocate nor criticize its direction.

jparise··on 23 Year Old Mark Andreessen Explains the Web (29:55)
I love that Marc presents using transparencies and an overhead projector.

[Skip to the 30 min mark for his portion of the video.]

jparise··on Octopress - A blogging framework for hackers
This appears to be covered on the linked site itself:

Octopress is now based on mojombo/jekyll has been completely rewritten from the ground up with a mountain of goodies.

- A semantic HTML5 template

- A Mobile friendly responsive (320 and up) layout (rotate, or resize your browser and see)

- Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google Plus One, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics

- An easy deployment strategy using Github pages or Rsync

- Built in support for POW and Rack servers

- Easy theming with Compass and Sass

- A Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting

jparise··on Flask 0.7 Released (Python Web Framework)
You can actually use Flask from within Tornado's WSGI adapter.

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/deploying/others/

This lets your leverage Tornado's high-performance IO loop while still developing your web application using Flask.

jparise··on Understanding the code inside Tornado, the asynchronous web server
Some of this is a bit dated. It looks like it was written in late 2009, judging by the first comment. For example, IO loop timers are now stored using a heapq[1] instead of a sorted list, and many of the other issues have been similarly addressed over the last year and a half.

Still, this is a good general overview of Tornado's internals.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/tornado/commit/b6c4d6d20196fa4fe...

jparise··on Google C++ Style Guide
We used that C++ constant naming convention at EA, too. I like it because it nicely differentiates C++ typed constants from preprocessor constants and macros (which we SPELLED_THUSLY).
jparise··on I've made Dayta free
For those who don't remember, Sahil built the first iteration of Dayta in one week. He logged his progress here: http://oneweekapp.com/
jparise··on Numbers and patterns in nature
Anyone interested in this topic should also check out "Nature's Numbers" by Ian Stewart (ISBN 9780465072736).
jparise··on Free Kindle Math Books
The same thing works in the Apple iBooks store ("CK-12 Foundation").
jparise··on Perl 6 in 2010 - a retrospection
Ah, I see that I truly missed your earlier point. I suppose I would just do this:

  def fib(max):
      a, b = 0, 1
      while a < max:
          yield a
          a, b = b, a + b

  for k in fib(100):
      print(k)
jparise··on Perl 6 in 2010 - a retrospection
You're right. I misread the range of the Perl version. Adjust the slice accordingly.
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