mkross

The red linkage graphs would be much more comprehensible with edge bundling[1]. As it is, you get a ton of red lines that are hard to decipher. In order to show emphasis, some of the lines are orange.

[1] Something akin to https://www.evernote.com/shard/s9/res/11fab8e3-d623-4b58-a8d.... I'm sure there are libraries out that that will do this for you, but the algorithm in that paper isn't too hard to implement. :)

tednaleid, you seem to be dead. Perhaps posting a link to wikipedia with no other content auto-triggered something.

Care to elaborate?

  // In Java, all instances of Object are also a monitor.
  // See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_%28synchronization%29
  Foo myMonitor = new Foo()

  // To "enter" a monitor, you use 'synchronized'.
  synchronized (myMonitor) {
    // Inside the monitor, we could do a Thread.sleep.
    Thread.sleep(100);
  }

This is a very simplistic problem case. However, it is very possible for this to become a bigger problem. Because I can call arbitrary code when "inside" a monitor, it is very possible to call a method that does a sleep incidentally. (e.g. many implementations of IO operations will require some sort of sleep.)

You could test that the logging and parsing are in step, which then reduces the developer time to "Doh, red test" and a simple fix.

I think the author is trying to make a poorly articulated argument that the _intent_ of G+ is not to "kill" Facebook, but instead improve Google's targeted advertising capabilities. To some extent, this is true, but I'm not sure if it is a relevant distinction. If Google had the option to replace Facebook wholesale, I'm sure they'd jump at the chance. Perhaps "not competing" is merely a way of lowering expectations?

How about the version of Siri that existed before being subsumed by Apple? I had never heard of it, though it seems that the tech was relatively the same.

> The relationship soured after they came to doubt his reincarnation credentials and found that his claims of cancer were false.

As someone who knows very little of Buddhism, what sorts of "reincarnation credentials" is an executive-level reincarnate supposed to have? Is this like claiming to have an MBA but leaving out the University of Phoenix part?

Private browsing won't stop google from logging anything. It will make it so your browser doesn't remember what you did, but it doesn't stop the authorities from knocking.

Maybe sugar is toxic. I don't know (and there seem to be some pretty reasonable opinions both ways). However, there is a line in the article that really stands out to me:

"If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them."

I can't tell if this is the author of the article extrapolating sugar's toxicity to explain the root of all ills, or whether Lustig makes that assertion. Either way, there doesn't seem to be anything more than postulation on that front. I'm hoping the purported science behind this theory is actually sound and not just fluff so that we get into arguments about sugar based on incorrect assumptions.

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ is the non-print version for anyone that ran into problems with the javascript on the print page.

Assuming the article is correct (and the video seems to back that up), I wouldn't even consider this protesting. Yelling over Clinton's speech, holding up signs, harassing people going to the speech, throwing shoes -- these are all protests. Quietly standing with your back to the speaker? Not a chance.

I was going to mumble something about correlation != causation, but I decided to track down the paper first (http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/195/5/408). The authors didn't explicitly decide that diet caused depression, but they did note that the data seems to invalidate the idea that depression caused bad diets.

"Them darn kids aint learnin cuz they aint tryin!"

Let's consider the assumption that between 36% and 45% of all undergrad students are slackers. Sure, a bunch of students aren't learning because they are slackers, but why there are SO MANY of them? Are there more slackers as a percentage of the population than in the past? Is the internet/cell-phone/facebook era changing the mentality of students to be more focused on the short term easiest/best solution? Or maybe the percent of slackers in the general populace is the same, but a much larger percentage of secondary students go on to undergrad. Well, why are so many more going on in school, especially those that are slackers? Parental/societal pressures might suggest that going to college is just "what you do" after high school. Or maybe peer pressure makes students continue in through school because their peers expect it of them. Perhaps it is sheer inertia that is the driving force; our slackers do whatever is the most expedient at the moment, so when the time comes they'd rather go to a generic college with an undecided major than to go and do something.

Or, (and I like this theory the most), students feel a need, from an economical perspective, to get a degree in order to get a job. And then they go to school, with the singular goal of earning that piece of paper so they can get a job. At this point, "slacker" has been forced into the role by going to school just to be able to get a job afterwards. It's a means to an end, and incidental value is just that. At this point, it isn't just the college's fault, but the general expectations of employers. Why do you require a college degree? Is knowing the theory essential to doing the work or save a substantial amount of training or ramp-up time?

1) "After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two." Thats 36% of students who spent four years without improving what the study authors deem as important cognitive abilities. Perhaps they learned all of their material sufficiently well to do XXX, but the study says they aren't, in a generalist sense, any smarter.

2) I can't tell from the article whether these statistics were actually influential in determining the students' scores on the test. I totally agree that this doesn't translate well between different majors. If the scores were affected by answering this question or the one about study habits or probably a number of others, then I don't really see the point of the study. They started from some sort of "if people take easier* classes, then they aren't as intelligent" baseline and then showed that people take easier* classes...

* "easier," by their definition, has something to do with writing X pages or reading Y pages.

I'm not seeing it. I think this argument boils down to "you have a lot of devices; everything in the cloud makes your stuff available everywhere all the time". Besides the fact that my gut says this is basically the same issue that netbooks vs. laptops presents, the author completely ignores a relatively huge deal: Chrome OS can't run your apps. Unless the stuff you are using all the time is already on the web, it won't run, regardless if you are running Windows, Mac, or Linux. (It seems to be possible to get to the Linux underbelly of the CR-48, but I'd be shocked if that was a common occurrence in consumer devices.)

I assume the reason to stop is due to a feeling of guilt. Instead of considering human influence as a part of nature, many people consider it to be some sort of perversion. So instead of being amazed by the adaptability of life, people feel guilty about causing changes.

Plus there is the whole time scale thing. The fact that evolution took a really long time to differentiate polar and grizzly bears and in a few lifetimes you would see that split undone is concerning.

Presumably the already late Java 7/8 will be further delayed.

"Crash course" doesn't explicitly mean non-technical. It could have included an overview of the encoding algorithm that doesn't go into perf improvements most commonly used.

The list of things to know about JPEG includes what the acronym means and how it is pronounced. If you're looking for a technical description, this isn't it.

Wait, science isn't creative? Someone go tell Einstein that his bizarre, nonsensical ideas about the universe can't be correct. Warn Galileo that thinking outside the box is anti-science. Let Pasteur know that meat doesn't rot because really small things are eating it.

Science is creative. We just don't usually think of it because science is that crazy thing with math and they like have this "scientific method" that they always follow. But why are experiments actually being carried out? Maybe someone has a crazy theory that under the right circumstances, a liquid can have 0 viscosity and start defying gravity. Or that there are forms of life that don't even need Phosphorous, one of the "key ingredients" to life.

Because Diaspora is open-source, it attracts this sort of "look at how bad the code is" attention. I'm willing to bet that the first prototype of yahoo/google/facebook all had terrible code that may have lasted a long time. However, by not being open source, no one was able to critique them on their software design mistakes and instead had to focus on the product itself.

Since it is open source, Diaspora could probably use the writers of these critique pieces (bad design, security holes, etc.) to actually make a better product.

(Tangentially, why are there so many blog posts about Diaspora's code? Is the code actually unforkable? Or is it just because Diaspora painted itself into a corner promising a secure social network on a relatively quick timeframe and now everyone wants to prove them wrong?)

The small things really do matter when dealing with fickle users. I wonder, though, how much of the 17% might be due to the placement of the checkbox. Putting it below the credit card info would make me think "wait, I'm paying these guys and they are telling me it isn't easy to use?". Perhaps moving it up by the email address field would yield different results.

I'm interested if this has any effect on Apple's FaceTime video chat stuff. I wouldn't expect too much to come of it, but it could become ammo for either side at some point in the future.

While Collection<Firetruck> has an indeterminate relationship with Collection<IVehicle>, this is good! If Collection<String> was a subclass of Collection<Object>, you could fill the collection with Strings and then pass it off to someone who is using it for Objects and adds in his own Integer. Now your collection is borked. :(

If you find yourself wanting to pass in Collection<Firetruck> to a method that only accepts Collection<IVehicle>, this usually means that the method isn't correctly typed. The rule of thumb for using 'super' and 'extends' is "Producer extends, Consumer super" or PECS. By applying this, the typing problem should go away, as your method is now accepting Collection<T extends IVehicle> and possibly returning Collection<? super T>, so you can both pass in your Collection<Firetruck> and reassign to a different variable of type Collection<Firetruck>. :)

(I think Josh Bloch wrote up a decent blog post about the PECS principle a couple of years ago. It might be worth reading for more information.)

Wait, generics support co/contra variance through the 'extends' and 'super' keywords. e.g. Collection<? extends Foo>

I'm confused by your first sentence; it isn't a higher standard to not assault others. Or do you mean that because techies are so .. something that they in particular should eliminate every possibility of someone being assaulted around them?

Minor nitpick: I graduated in Dec '09 and came back to Palantir in Jan '10. After working on interesting problems and writing stuff that people not only use, but are willing to pay for, I was hooked. School, by comparison, was a lot less interesting and probably less useful.