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ntoshevon The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook

Python has it's share of warts. Its automatic memory management is not a modern GC, it involves reference counters that are slow, take up memory and don't play well with copy-on-write semantics of modern virtual memory managers. Its functional programming support is half-hearthed, its implementation is slow, there is no optional static typing, the GIL sucks. And yet it's the best programming language for me - the others are worse.

ntoshevon Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

Now I feel less guilty for refusing to install Moonlight on my Ubuntu laptop and downloading Feynman lectures from isohunt torrents instead.

ntoshevon I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

The way Facebook's Graph API is structured can be applied to other datasets containing interconnected objects. It's like a REST service serving JSON, with a specific way to construct the URLs. I like it a lot. Here is a blog post explaining the Freebase implementation:

http://blog.freebase.com/2010/04/29/a-freebase-implementatio...

The Facebook docs:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

But even the cleanest API is of no use if the API calls don't actually work...

ntoshevon I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

> strongly recommend against building your entire business around a single platform

I see this statement a lot and I never understand it. If you're Zynga, should you build Farmville for OpenSocial and as an independent site too? The cost of doing this seems prohibitive.

Most businesses built on Facebook can be taken elsewhere if the cost of the Facebook platform starts to outweigh the benefits. Even Farmville can be ran independently, but consider how many users they'd lose in the transition and afterwards.

ntoshevon I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

This is just spelling / grammar, I have no problems with these errors, especially when the main documentation is wiki-based (this may be because I'm not a native speaker). In my limited experience with Facebook docs before the Open Graph API, I haven't seen factual errors, but there are a lot of omissions.

Open Graph API seems very clean and it also seems like it doesn't need much documentation... if the API calls actually worked. I haven't used it and I don't plan to start using it given these reports (in the old API there were also quite a few things that break occasionally and take forever to be repaired).

ntoshevon I’m done building Facebook apps for clients

This is Bret Taylor's Graph API - the concept simplified the API a lot, and companies like Freebase copied it for their own data. Too bad it is not working...

ntoshevon Products For People Who Make Products For People

LUI = "Linguistic" UI, including CLI

You're right it can be easier once you are familiar with it, but there's nothing to suggest how/if "up" works if you are not.

ntoshevon Products For People Who Make Products For People

Graphic UIs show you what actions are available right there, linguistic UIs rely on you to think up a valid expression in that program's particular language to do what you need. GUIs will always be easier for simpler stuff, but less expressive than LUIs.

ntoshevon Cuil Goes Down for Good

I don't use Yahoo/Bing straight up, e.g. I re-rank, omit, etc.

All re-ranking you can do is very limited with these services because they are black boxes: you don't see what factors went into ranking a page the way it happened, you can't tweak the weight of different factors, you can't add new factors. All you can have is hardcoded rules like "if there is a wikipedia page in the first 20 results, bring it on top" that don't really add much value, because if that wikipedia page is any good it would be on top already. With spam results it's similar: you can provide impressive customer service blacklisting spam on user requests, but major search engines are already pretty good in low-ranking spam so much that you don't see it if there are any other meaningful results.

Your marketing here on HN has been brilliant, you have some very interesting UI decisions and possibilities that Google doesn't have, but your added value is definitely not in improved ranking of results.

ntoshevon You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities

So does he mean you shouldn't negotiate opportunities? I don't think this is valid in general.

ntoshevon Eric Schmidt: We'll pull Facebook's data by hook or by crook

For a quote out of context, by "that information" he could have easily meant "the real-world social connections between people", which Google could probably infer from Gmail.

Such articles are meaningless.

ntoshevon Giving up on Google

You should really automate this feedback process by mining the web for examples where people complain about Google quality AND they mention the search queries themselves :-)

ntoshevon Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again

What do you think about granularity of filtering: do not take all your customers' servers down, just filter the offending pages/services at network level until they sort it out.

ntoshevon Microsoft Academic Search

Is this better at anything than http://scholar.google.com? I find it inferior: it's slower and I can't filter by time. Search results seem similar.

ntoshevon Ask HN: What is Gravity?

Feynman's "Messenger lectures" @ Cornell begin with the example of the law of gravitation, and it's a really excellent lecture (for you, not for your son).

I think your son doesn't need answers to the questions you ask here. He wants a simpler explanation allowing him to understand the concept and relate it to things he sees in his daily life. Start with something counter-intuitive to hold his attention, e.g. with the fact that things with different mass fall with equal speed. Then talk about the Earth and the moon, tides, what an orbit is.

ntoshevon Some lesser-known truths about programming

Don't worry about the lines of code you write, I'm pretty sure even Dr Norvig can't write 50 of these per day: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

ntoshevon Ray Kurzweil Responds to "Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain"

It's not in the other half of the genome. All cells in an organism share the same DNA, but different cells develop in a very differentiated manner depending on the cells around them (e.g. should it be a neuron or a connecting tissue?). The "decompression algorithm" is in the laws of physics, biochemistry, and the way life works in general. Since we don't understand these well enough, we can't make reasonable information-theoretic claims about the "decompressed" genome.

ntoshevon Ray Kurzweil Responds to "Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain"

> the decompression algorithm, i.e. the route from the genome to brain, is insanely complex, but it doesn't say anything about the actual complexity of the brain

This is where both Kurzweil and you are wrong. A very complex compression/decompression scheme can achieve much better compression. Intuitively, you can encode some of the information in the decompressor itself, even if it is in a very abstract form. This is the reason why compression competitions include size of the decompressor code, e.g. http://prize.hutter1.net/

ntoshevon The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States

This is a good benchmark, but not perfect, since people can only upvote what they already see.

Try bringing some schizophrenia to the site: show the "classic" version to the "classic" crowd by default for some time and see if the two versions will diverge more.

Subjectively I feel programming articles are getting rarer on HN.

ntoshevon I have tried to be happy with django, I really have.

I'm the opposite, e.g. I find Django templates too restrictive.

I have used Rails, but my web framework of choice is Tornado; I really like their design choices.

ntoshevon World Population Graphed By Latitude And Longitude

It would be more interesting to see this map corrected for land mass to see actual density.

ntoshevon The Python yield keyword explained

Generators actually allow you to decouple code in more ways than normal functions and classes let you. See the "Why functional programming matters" paper, or the more practical presentation here:

http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/Generators.pdf

ntoshevon Ask HN: Tips for Hackers having Kids?

On Unix I did this:

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

There is a free iPhone app too.

ntoshevon What Happened to Yahoo

Are there hedge funds or investment banks who treat quants/software engineers equally to the traders?

ntoshevon Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

I think it was more of a regret that his intuition about the problem area gets invalidated so quickly. The top technical guys are supposed to have good intuitions about what works and what doesn't; this is a major part of the value they can add. So I take this as a very serious self-criticism.

ntoshevon Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

What justifies a product management role separate from the developers? A PM that is also a developer understands better what is the cost of all these features.

Maybe a separate PM would see the forest better as he is not looking at specific trees, but there are a lot of people who can do both well.

ntoshevon Why Roger Penrose thinks computers can't

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

E. Dijkstra

ntoshevon Startup Competitive Advantages that Work

The founders he admires (Gates&Allen, Jobs&Wozniak, Page&Brin) probably wouldn't be able to articulate competitive advantages that this guy considers "real". They didn't have insider info or authority. They were passionate about what they are doing, but who knows if they were more passionate than their competitors (also applying this point to Apple for design and Google for search is not correct; Apple sacrifices very little to make their products look beautiful (and this is a narrow understanding of design), Google founders cared more about collaborative filtering at first).

ntoshevon World War II was totally unrealistic

WWII fits the stereotypes so well because it originated (a lot of) them.

No intellectual curiosity was satisfied by the article.

ntoshevon IncPy: Automatic memoization for Python

You should str(args), not just kwargs, to be able to use parameters like lists or dicts as keys for self.mem