petewarden

I have to say, I was amazed at how nice an atmosphere there was when I visited LinkedIn a couple of months back. I was expecting something a bit stuffy, considering their market and somewhat conservative approach to innovation, but the people in the hallways and lunch room seemed genuinely relaxed and happy. It especially struck me after visiting Facebook a few hours earlier and finding it somewhat grim. All very subjective of course, but it makes me think this is a bit of real fun, not a horrific corporate attempt at 'flair'.

I get about 1 comment and 1100 page views a day, which is a similar ratio. Thanks to an Intense Debate/Feedburner bug (FB adds ?=... to the end of the article link in the RSS and ID treats it as a different page for comments) I've noticed I actually get a lot of my comments from my 1600ish subscribers though.

When people ask what I do, I often break the ice by saying "I'm self-unemployed" with a smile. I can then explain the somewhat complicated web of open-source, startup building and consulting projects that fill my day, without some of the awkwardness that being hard to categorize sometimes invokes.

Or I just tell them I'm doing so well that Facebook got scared and tried to sue me out of business!

Ever wondered why Dundee in Scotland has a lot of game companies? In the 80's Timex made the Spectrum there, so all the local kids ended up with the machines thanks to (sometimes ahem 'unofficial') employee discounts.

So you have Clive Sinclair to thank for both Lemmings and GTA!

I'm nowhere near as mathematically savvy as RoG, but I do have some practical experience from dealing with game physics simulations. A classic problem with naive collision code is objects popping through each other occasionally, and a common 'fix' is to switch from float to double precision. This reduces the frequency of the errors, but that's seldom good enough.

Plane intersections can be performed completely accurately using bignum code, since there's no irrational numbers to creep in, but the performance penalty is far too severe for everyday use in games (at least it was a decade ago when I was last in the industry). Instead, the best approach was to carefully re-design the algorithms so that they're tolerant to small errors. For example by applying a repulsion force based on how deep inside a surface a polygon is, rather than trying to capture (and possibly missing) the exact point of an intersection, or adding a small 'thickness' to all polygons.

I've found this to be a useful approach in all my subsequent work in both graphics and statistical analysis. I start off using floats for all my real number storage, and if I see precision-related problems, I have a long hard think about how to redesign the algorithm to be more robust, rather than just automatically throwing more bits at it.

Get involved with Techstars and the tech community, there's a lot of events all the time here in Boulder. Boulder/Denver New Tech meetups are probably the best introduction:

http://www.bdnewtech.com/

There's lots of examples of successful lone founders, but most of the angel investors I met cringed at the thought of putting money into a one-man band. It's possible to overcome that with enough traction, but it is an extra obstacle.

Definitely. At the end of the day, the best way to get any kind of funding is to make people worry that they're missing the boat heading towards a ton of money. Demonstrating real customers, and everything else that falls under 'traction' and 'momentum' is the way to achieve that.

If I had to do it again, I'd completely forget about the money-raising and spend the three months focused on the product, and worry about everything else much later. That's not a great fit for the Techstars program, though some of the most interesting companies to come out of it have ended up boot-strapping, eg Occipital/Red Laser.

XCode is an awesome IDE, way better than Eclipse, and nicer than Visual Studio+Visual Assist, which was a surprisingly strong combo.

But, it keeps getting crippled by its need to do fancy UI stuff to impress Steve. Wheee, pretty iChat bubbles for errors! A find using standard Apple conventions! A per-edit file history!

In theory these would be fine, if a bit irrelevant to my daily coding, but inevitably the execution breaks something important that used to work. The find problems are documented elsewhere in this thread, but my personal bug-bear is the file history. You used to be able to cycle back and forth through the files you'd opened in a window, which was an awesome way of building up a working set without having to think. Now if you make an edit, all of your 'forward' history is lost. See the comments here for others bitten by that:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1724655/xcode-3-2-1-file-...

It's not that the XCode team aren't aware of these bugs, all of Apple's internal developers use it and give feedback, but their priorities seem to be driven by demo-ability not usability.

If you look at http://facebook.com/robots.txt there's actually a sitemap. It's protected, and may well not contain these pages, but I have heard that Google and other privileged partners have access to it.

It's just for text files, but opendiff is a pretty nice GUI diff that gets quietly installed as part of the Developer Tools package on OS X:

http://data.agaric.com/node/1101

I've reluctantly come to a similar conclusion. I moved to California from the UK in 2001 thinking that the anti-smoking laws in bars, etc were oppressive 'nanny-state' measures. I was finally able to give up smoking though, and it really helped that it was socially unacceptable to light up a cigarette in most situations. It also helped that I left behind my smoking friends and hung out with people who didn't smoke, so it wasn't just the laws, but it made me reconsider my previous position on paternalistic regulations.

I discovered this through a fantastic list of 'mindfuck movies':

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/mindfuck_movi...

It's definitely the most complex of the bunch, but most of them were great finds. Cube was another low-budget gem, and on the other end of the spectrum there's The Game with Michael Douglas.

I agree with you that your underlying data has to be on something people care about. It's necessary but not sufficient, since the same visualization without labels and coloring sank without a trace when I released it a week before.

The gentleman himself here!

You're right to be suspicious, there is a bias towards the more popular pages, since they show up more frequently on people's crawlable public profile pages. Only 20 liked pages are shown for each person, and FB apparently pick the most popular.

"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

Enthusiasm, like optimism, is a choice rather something that just happens to you. It requires a lot of forethought (what do I really care about?) and continual maintenance. You need to spend time discovering and remembering the fascinating parts of whatever you're doing, and the end-results you're shooting for.

I was stuck in an awful job stocking a supermarket, with no alternatives I could find. I realized I had a choice about how I approached it, I could either mope around all day or find something I liked about it. I discovered my OCD side really appreciated looking down a whole aisle and seeing every can perfectly stacked with the labels aligned. It still makes me smile thinking about it, and left me enthusiastic enough to stick with that job for years, get through college and move onto other goals.

Here's the paper giving details:

http://www2.research.att.com/~bala/papers/wosn09.pdf

There's three ways info leaks:

1 - Referer header, eg facebook.com/profile.php?id=1

2 - Request, eg analytics.google.com/script.js?page=facebook.com/profile.php?id=1

3 - Cookies, eg z.digg.com points to an omniture server, and so passes all digg cookies to them!

1 and 2 are easily exploitable by advertisers who wanted to, but 1 especially seems like a very standard way of building urls on most services. Definitely will get them hammered for good reason, but there's not necessarily any bad intent.

3 seems a lot worse. Are there legit reasons I'm missing for hosting ad servers on the same domain, and so puncturing the browser security model?

No, but he does discover that the guard/prisoner relationship is a lot more complex than he expected, relying for the most part on subtle persuasion and negotiation by the guard not raw coercion. He also show how much time prisoners devote to getting inside their guards' heads, since they often were manipulative and amoral personalities on the outside and now they have nothing else to vent those skills on.

If you're interested in the strange working relationship between guards and prisoners, I highly recommend Newjack:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newjack:_Guarding_Sing_Sing?w...

The author is a journalist who was refused access to Sing Sing, so he joined the prison service as a guard there for a year.

A few points I can confirm from talking with Jud about this over the last few weeks:

- Billions is the correct magnitude. It's the result of Gnip's aggregation of multiple Twitter-firehose-scale feeds over a year. They are massive users of S3 storage.

- I'm unsure why he's using an XL instance in this case, but I know he's been experimenting heavily with different configs to improve performance

- How do you get sustained 700 deletes a second? I'm not being facetious, I see much slower performance using commercial and open-source interfaces to S3 like s3cmd or Bucket Explorer. I'd love to find some faster approaches.

On a related note, I've been on the partial Twitter firehose and I've only seen around 5 million unique users over a couple of months. Granted this is the partial firehose, but I'd still expect the number of uniques to approach the true number of active users over a long enough time period. I'm seeing comparitively few new users at this point.

One other researcher I've talked to has similar results, anybody else gathering data on this?

No split-window view for comparisons: http://ticket.macromates.com/show?ticket_id=F4398B73

It doesn't look like that's achievable via plugins either, so my experiment with TextMate is over unfortunately.

You finally pushed me into giving it a try. I started a 'Find in project' on a project with some multi-megabyte text files, and it not only gave me the Beachball of Death, it also was thrashing so heavily it took several minutes to get the terminal to respond enough to kill it.

I wasn't ready to give up, so I did some research and uncovered "Grep in Project", a replacement that does it right: http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/06/grep-in-project-command-for-tex...

I don't know what it is about "Find in Project" that drives text editor programmers to reinvent grep, badly. XCode suffered from terrible performance too for a long time.

> It's complex, let's just give up with laws. Not a good stance.

Think of legislation as a script written by a committee that's then deployed with no testing. Sometimes it's the only way to solve a problem, but it's a very blunt instrument.

There's no contradiction in dreading the thought of legislators tackling a complex problem when it's not necessary, whilst accepting that there are some issues that can only be solved by passing laws.

My favo(u)?rite phrase from the article was "a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger's arse". I'll be looking for an excuse to use that in my next business meeting.

It's not just growth prospects, you're making a bet on the regulatory environment continuing to restrict the supply of homes. It may seem like California will never open up more land for housing, but it's not a law of nature.

In my experience, a good click-through rate is about 0.1%, which makes sense since they're essentially banner ads 2.0, there's no intent captured at all. That said, they were cheap enough that I was able to acquire new users for my Facebook app at around $2 each in my small-scale tests.

> just go ahead and go to walmart for an hour to see what the average person is.

I spent five years working in various discount supermarkets as a cashier. The average person there is struggling with challenges that make typical hacker problems look trivial.

- They either have very unfulfilling jobs, or none at all

- Many people they meet pre-judge them as weak or stupid because they're poor

- The community that does support them also holds them back, by criticizing attempts to get ahead and condoning self-destructive behavior

- They have no safety net for when they screw up. Failures like a marriage breakup or losing a job have massive and immediate impacts on their lives

- On top of all this, they're often raising kids in the same environment, desperately hoping they can escape

Don't take too much comfort that we're 'outliers and exemplars of thought', actions and attitudes that we regard as obviously stupid have a strong internal logic in their world. Religious fundamentalism is a joke? I agree, but for a woman who's had a family devastated by marriage breakups and substance abuse, its tenets are pretty damn attractive. Smoking or overeating? If the rest of your life is unfulfilling, at least you can be guaranteed a little pleasure in your day.

Here's an article from Cuil's blog about the launch:

http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-...

"I was a stay at home dad, I dropped by Kleiner Perkins to try to get some money to write a search engine". This has to be an elaborate piece of satirical performance art.

The B52 program was driven by Colonel Pete Warden. He's no relation unfortunately, but its birth was an amazing engineering story:

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b52-strat/b52_5...