jplahn

Meta question: what do you consider spammy about this blog post? It seems like a perfectly fine, digestible narrative of the product without requiring the reader to sift through a product page.

On a more related note, I find it interesting that the product page says there's a 4 year warranty on the camera body. I didn't see anything about the warranty on the mod itself.

Then why do we use the summary rollup when it completely loses any of the granular insights? It makes no sense for me to say I'm an E when it was 51E, 49I. For me personally, shouldn't I instead say something like 51E64N60F65J? Likewise, the "insights" you get into your 4 letters is based on whatever the majority letter was, even when your percentages are nowhere near 100% for each.

I've become a Cal Newport fan and I'd recommend you read at least some of his blog (http://calnewport.com/blog/) or his book (Deep Work) since he'll be able to explain things much better than I can.

In knowledge work, it's important (for most people) to get into deep focus to solve hard problems. Anecdotally I've seen huge gains by setting aside an 1:30 in the morning to WFH completely disconnected and then another 1:30 in the afternoon to hide away from my open work area. It's incorrect to claim that development of soft skills is at odds with the ability to get into a state of deep work with offices and / or working from home.

As for your question about being hard to focus on some work, yes it definitely is. I'd recommend you look into attention residue. In addition, I'm afraid your perception of your own possible output is probably much less than what you're actually capable of because you've learned to live with constant distraction. If you can't go more than an hour without checking email/texts/talking to coworkers/being interrupted, I'd argue that (as a knowledge worker), you're operating well below your capabilities.

This feels a little bit like Lombok in the Java world. Can anybody with experience with both comment on that?

We use Lombok a fair amount within our code to abstract away a lot of the class setup, which has been nice. But as I move more towards the Python world, I'm interested to see how attr fits in.

I know a few teams in Walmart Labs use Clojure, so there's at least some small percentage of the tech side adept in the functional world.

Very cool! I've been looking for something like this for a while in hopes that I could get a better feel for the tech industry through Scotland. I lived there for 7 years during middle school and high school and I'm always flirting with the idea of heading back. Sadly my EU residency lapsed, making it a little more difficult (not that it would help for much longer..).

It would be great to have more sorting options, particularly if I wanted to get back to the Granite city :).

We read Name of the Rose in my 10th grade English class and it was a tome that challenged us all for the couple of weeks that we pored over it. I love that book. I've read it one other time since then and it's amazing the number of layers that continue to appear when you read it a second (and, presumably, a third) time. When you spend so much time dissecting somebody's work, you develop a sort of relationship with them, one that forms easily when you have a teacher that distills a deep appreciation for the work you're knee deep in trying to understand.

Mr. Eco you will be missed.

I'm sad. I used to love this site back when I was an engineering mechanics student (pre-CS). It gave me the ability to converse with people that were similarly interested in inventing and opened my eyes up to a whole host of interesting solutions to large and small problems alike.

I think what I'll miss most about it was scrolling through the list of inventions and marveling at the incredible amount of variance between seemingly good ideas, and the heaping mass of ridiculous ideas. Even though I loved picking apart ideas that I thought were completely implausible, the very fact that people were putting the time into designing and fighting for their inventions was something I loved. I honestly didn't follow the company during the last few years, and I can't say I'm completely surprised that they reached this point, but it will always have a special place in my heart for enabling the creative side of many people.

This is anecdotal, but staying in Airbnbs made my cross country drive from Richmond, VA to Seattle much better than if I had stayed in hotels.

1) The prices were significantly cheaper. I stayed in a room in a beautiful home in Spokane for $35 a night. Sure, you can find rundown 2 star "hotels" for $50 - $60 a night, but trying to find something of comparable quality in a hotel would increase that substantially. Where Airbnb was great was in little towns and areas in the midwest. I stayed in the entire top floor of the most amazing, one hundred year old creamery turned bar turned home in Fertile, IA for $65. Hotels in any nearby city / town were much more and couldn't come close to matching the value.

2) Being able to stay in interesting places really is a benefit. I stayed with an amateur chef in Cincinnati who cooked a fantastic breakfast that otherwise would have cost me $15 at a hotel. I stayed with Yellowstone guides in Belgrade, MT that told me exactly where I need to go the park next time I visit. When I was tired some days and wanted the hotel experience, hosts were more than happy to let me have that.

3) If you want to be really sure you're staying somewhere great, look for superhosts. I never had an experience that didn't match up with the reviews that a host received. Reviews on airbnb actually make hosts and guests accountable for the quality of the stay.

4) The local experience is what you make of it. Hosts typically will let you control the amount of interaction you want to have. It's impossible for them to predict what everybody wants, so you have to communicate.

All of your points don't match up at all with what my experience has been. I love the experience and quality Airbnb helps provide and hotels are always my second choice now.

Really? I understand the point you're "attempting" to make, but to claim that what is acted on TV is the same as what actually occurs is such a stretch I didn't think anybody would attempt to make it.

I don't equate animated child porn with actual child porn, much in the same way I don't equate the beheadings in GoT with the beheadings of IS. But to insinuate that the poster above would extend their 'committing a crime,' in the case of actual child rape, to something that is acted out for TV is an injustice to what they actually said. In essence, you just threw up a strawman and attacked it as a way of validating your final point (which, by most accounts, I agree with).

Ah I wish I had known about this! I lived in Aberdeen for 7 years and, as a lover of Lemmings when I was younger, I would have loved to check this out during one of the many times I drove through Dundee. Very cool.

Interesting resource! I like this take on learning C.

On another note, I LOVE gdb. One of my prof's begged and pleaded for us to use gdb with all of our assignments because he claimed it would make life easier. For our first two computer org classes, you might be able to skate by without it (except for the buffer bomb and binary bomb), but once you reached the third semester and beyond, those that didn't spend a little time acclimating themselves with gdb began to hate life.

I really do love gdb. It saved my ass more times than I can remember.

I'm so glad to see The Little Book of Semaphores on here, especially in the top 5. I didn't expect to see it on a list like this, but I found it to be immensely helpful. In my OS class last semester, my prof mentioned it almost in passing, so I don't think many people paid much attention to it, but it solidified my understanding of threading immensely, especially in anticipation of the thread pool we had to write.

Also awesome to see The Little Schemer on here. That was also a book that was recommended in passing in my comparative language class and again I don't think people paid much attention to it. But I learned a lot from it as well.

I'm looking forward to following this list.

Looks great Joel! Definitely going to check this out and start working through it. I've noticed the huge bifurcation between extremely applied data science and almost entirely mathematical based. I was always wary of 'learning' data science through applications only, but as you alluded to, it's significantly more exciting. Likewise, most introductory statistics classes are so poorly delivered that many people have a deeply ingrained fear of the underlying concepts.

As a side note, do you attend any data events in Seattle? I'm moving there in June after graduation and would love to talk with somebody doing my dream job.

Surprisingly, there actually IS fiber in Blacksburg. At one of the co-working spaces downtown, they got gigabit internet two years ago. But sadly it hasn't extended from there and the project itself barely got funded.

That's intersting. I know in Blacksburg, if this was to come to town, people would switch en masse. Other than internet on campus, the quality is terrible.

I see the service has launched in Charlottesville. As a Virginia Tech Hokie, it's hard to stomach that the Hoos are getting if first, but in all seriousness, I think this is a great thing.

That being said, there's a lot of information that seems to be missing. I'm not sure how excited to be about this until I see pricing.

I think that's an interesting point, _if_ people actually do that. That said, I'm wary of the claim of 1/10th time and being able to iterate 3 or 4 times per every one iteration with Haskell. Sure, maybe when you're starting out, but once you become proficient I don't think that would be the case anymore. And, there's no guarantee that 3rd or 4th iteration will be as good as the well thought out Haskell code, since the first iterations may be prohibitively complex.

I assume they would have build in stipulations regarding how long you attempt the delivery, under what conditions, and at which point you simply drop it off at the post office or the persons house. Maybe they don't, but I would hope they've considered it.

Goodness sakes. I used to be 'anti-Apple' because I thought it was a bunch of people following a trend. Then I entered high school and realized that I was acting like a child and people have different preferences.

I shudder to think what my middle school self would think of me as I type this from my MBP. I use a Mac as my laptop. So what? I run Linux on my desktop and have an Android phone. This all seems unnecessarily petty.

This is awesome! I'm currently working through a machine learning project for one of my classes, and I was using flight data (which is also super interesting), but the inner astronomer in me is pushing for me to scrap everything I've done and pick a dataset from here.

But, even if I don't, I foresee many experiments with this data. Awesome.

This is such a slippery slope it makes me sad anyone would even suggest breaking up a company based off their 'importance to society.' If the founders don't have the right to decide which direction the company should go, who gets to decide and what gives them more of a right than the founders? I don't know who would decide what the threshold is whereby your company is now too beneficial to society and you must relinquish control. And to what fields to we extend this policy? If Khan Academy is found to be ubiquitous with homeschooling and providing an immense benefit to students, should we strip the leadership of powers lest they teach something we don't think is correct? It's such a slippery slope.

As others have commented, if Google had been shown to be malicious with regards to their search results, then I'd say some regulation is in order. But to espouse that we should take control of the direction of their company due to the quality of their product (and the adoption of it, as a result) is, in my opinion, incredibly asinine.

Likewise, if we do break up the company, how would you propose to do that? Because what I think you're going to argue in favor of is treating some of the new pieces as a public utility and leaving other pieces as private corporations.

Very true. If people I know are any indication, when we'd get to a new city (for a wedding, for example), they'd furiously swipe every person that showed up. All that does it water down the entire app and defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Last thing anyone wants to hear is "Oh, I didn't mean to swipe right..".

It's a question I've been interested in about how you can improve response rates and whether you should give people more swipes based on the amount of actual interaction they have with other people, which may indicate they're using it properly.

As somebody who flirted around with Tinder for a little while (ha ha), I think this is a pretty good idea. But at the same time, I think I'd prefer to be able to select which Instagram photos I would like to remain hidden, in case they're of a more personal nature. But beyond this, I can't help but feel the entire Tinder experience is slowly deteriorating. The beautiful simplicity of what it used to be is slowly starting to be replaced, which I suppose is to be expected, but disappointing nonetheless. I can't help but feel they'll quickly monetize the amount of swipes you get, so they can quickly squeeze users down to a couple a day.

As sort of a mini experiment, I downloaded some of the other apps out there that are in the same sphere and I've found Hinge to be particularly interesting (assuming you're in a large city). I'm kind of fascinated by all of these relationship apps and I'd love to see data on which are most effective (not for personal gain, mind you).

I think the keyword is "indifference." While everybody miscalculates the CEO - unskilled pay ratio, the article is implying the indifference caused by "American cultural optimism" is what prevents us from changing it.

I'm definitely going to look into this. Even with working on a second degree in Engineering Mechanics, I've found that I have forgotten a considerable amount of information I learned earlier in my degree (likely replaced by the overwhelming information in CS). I would love to brush back up on those areas, if only to overcome my fears of mechanical inadequacy. Without constant application, material as complex as mechanics can simply slip away, so having a book like this that hits on the high notes would be fantastic.

You're completely missing the point. He's saying that for everyone's sake, contextualizing the numbers improves the quality of everyone's understanding and helps determine the actual significance of the news. You and I both would benefit, not just him.

Humblebrag? Maybe. But was there a promise of new insights into affiliate networks? He simply described his experience with online income, but he never claimed to provide fresh insight into the business.

I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a very useful review.

I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.