mukaiji

Meanwhile my alma mater recently changed its logo as well...

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/11/15/1073130/

great response. thanks!

Anyone has a good summary of Scala vs Go? I know a bit of the former (with typeface for high-concurrency) and was wondering what Go might have to offer.

I think it's a bit off on the predictions relating to energy. The best way to explain why is to borrow from Vinod Khosla's theory of energy black swans, and assume that the forms of energy we know and make use of today are going to be replaced by forms of energy we either don't know of or haven't yet managed to master.

500 years is simply a long, long, long time from now in terms of human progress. I think the energy description provided here might possibly fit a model of our energy mix 100 years from now. However, it's very unlikely to be the one we follow 500 years from now, simply because the basis for energy-related discoveries dictates that every few decades an entirely new form of energy is discovered and gets subsequently iterated upon until economically viable. It simply isn't factually reasonable to assume that we have already discovered all possible forms of energy production.

By the way, i did energy-related research which is why i wanted to point this out. Regardless of these flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that essay.

tl;dr: energy-predictions 500 years out are not reasonable because of Vinod Khosla's theory of energy black swans.

This is kind of cool. I'd love to see a demo. I'm in Palo Alto.

I looked at the site as well. I'm curious how you plan to differentiate from say Nest or Android@Home.

thank you for your remarkable courage and determination.

That abstract is epic. It would be funny if all scientists made a mention of the impact of their research on interstellar highly-relativistic flight.

Can't up vote this comment either. Just the reel to reel player is a joke.

Both.

Well he wasn't very liked either.

Just to be clear, he's not "leaving." He got fired. He got fired because after the map fiasco became apparent, he refused to send out an apology or sign his name to the one Tim Cook sent. (internal knowledge)

So... can we now all agree that Tim Cook is a good CEO?

Ah, good catch! I remember a while back comparing CNT prices per gram versus gold and it was something like $20 a gram for gold. Must have been a low then. Thanks for catching it.

material scientist here. I've worked on carbon nanotubes (cnt if you want to sound cool) for a few years. Looking at them under the electron microscope, I've always wondered how in the hell we'd ever line them up without having to recourse to nano-tweezers (which of course is impractical if you want to scale to a few billion switches). Looks like IBM finally cracked a decent technique (though I suppose the device yield isn't that great), and it hopefully will be a path toward production. What would be really cool is if we can find economically-viable application for carbon nanotubes outside of semi-conductors. The biggest problem right now is their cost (~$400/gram for good purity [for reference: 20X the price of gold]) and the fact that platinum is used as a destructive catalyst to make them.

This is great! The other day I was wondering if anyone had tried to build an open-source Splunk equivalent. I'll look into your guys' stuff. thanks for the ref!

Splunk is a great tool for any sort of logs, and that includes user events and so forth. Basically, if you log it, Splunk will index it, and then you can find ways to search it, correlate it, reverse-analyze it... the whole nine-yards. However, as another user mentioned below, "Log every single action, decision, call, message, visit, and fault in detail. Log it with structure." If you don't do that, Splunk won't be that useful. I can think of a few example at work where missing details in log lines quickly deflates my Splunk enthusiasm. So, log everything and carefully, all the time. Then Splunk becomes your friend.

Google analytics is great for basic web stuff (getting origin of requests and so forth). KISSMetric is phenomenal as well. If you do email marketing, I think SendGrid might be a good option to measure email engagement metric, on top of not having to maintain an email service.

If ever you feel like doing more data crunching on your own, I recommend getting started with Splunk. The company i work for uses it extensively. Splunk is phenomenal but tricky to use properly (I'll explain). I think the reason it works so well for us is because every action taken by either the server or user-facing devices is carefully logged. As a result, we're able to pull insightful user metrics in highly customizable way that any other service out there just can't get you. Here's the downside of Splunk: since it's so hands-on, there's little initial guidance as to what you should be looking at, and thus the hardest part of Splunk is knowing how to ask the right question. Beyond that, it definitely has its quirks. For example, I wish it was easier to export data to do more in depth data analysis with matlab and the likes (they have a so-so api). I also question the accuracy of their indexing at times (rumors has it around the office that there are log lines that don't get properly fetched...). In any case, if you are serious about analytics (and can afford it in the long run), Splunk is a strong candidate. It will force you to think long and hard about what exactly you are trying to measure.

edit: grammar.

It's an interesting experiment. If it succeeds, it would be ironic that the solution to America's public transportation is coming from Detroit: after all, GM & co are the guys who bought America's trolleys in the 1950's and disassembled them to boost sales of cars.

EDIT: related story on SF's private lines http://stamen.com/zero1/

My HN timeline for today:

(morning) "Color to be shutting down" (afternoon) "Color IS NOT shutting down" (evening) "Color is acquired by Apple"

wtf just happened.

When I first opened the iOS6 timer and the stopwatch, and saw the neon style button, I was a bit confused.

It looks very nice but I thought it broke with design patterns of iOS in terms of color scheme, ambiance, typography (all cap text label), or even button size. It felt more like an Android interface than an iOS one. Anyone feeling the same way?

Yes, but those who carry out the peer-review, are the researchers themselves: at times, at little to no cost to the publisher, simply because the reviewing scientist (and the postdoc she/he usually assigns to do the grunt work) get the "prestige" of being a reviewer/editor for a given publication.

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, publish the content and make money off of the subscription they sell, and sue the hell out of anyone who tries to wrestle it back out of their control.

I checked this morning. It's on the developer website, but still in preview mode.

I applaud the fact that this isn't just a post about "how to learn" to code; however, I think there is a need to specify that some of these references are not entirely necessary for a decent subset of programmers. For example, you listed Computer Organization and Design by Patterson & Hennessy. I think it's a fantastic book, and had to go through 11 chapters of it for the sake of a Stanford architecture class. The first few chapters almost feel like a must read for all, but unless you're going to be doing system stuff, i'm not sure it's really that important to know the intricate detail of pipelining.

Additionally, I think a good starting reference you may want to add for not-so-deeply technical folks is Computer Systems, A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant & O'Hallaron.

I don't believe you can survive in a true vacuum. Your skin would bruise instantly for one.

Please look into the B category first (both b1 & B2), for the 3 months period. After YC, if you get funding, as a founder you should look at the E visa category. I believe E2 visa is the one for founders with secured funding that can realistically create 10 american jobs in the long run.

I'm in the bay. Background in matsci. Got interesting ideas?

E145 is ok. I took it in person at Stanford. I think if you have no clue about the ins and outs of tech, it can be a nice starting point. My other recommendation would to just read venture deals and check out jake blakemaster's cs183 essays. I sat in that class and it was phenomenal.

I highly recommend crypto & machine learning. Tina Seelig can also be quite phenomenal but I only attended seminars of hers so can't speak about her full course.