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plam

247 karma · joined July 5, 2011

I am Paul, co-founder, data engineer, and a functional programming enthusiast. I am here to learn and share. My blog is at www.quantisan.com
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plam··on Security Notice: Linode Manager Password Reset
so what's a good alternative that offers all of security, reliability, good service, about $40 for 2GB/8-cores, multi-locations, etc?
plam··on Ask HN: How did you find your early adopters?
Cliche but true: Become your client and swim in their circle.

I sold a product for business users. I presented myself as an expert in the field and became active in the field. Although the product actually came after the fact as I figured I might as well monetise on my publicity.

My first paying client contacted me days after I posted an open for beta landing page without any marketing.

Edit: after the first few customers, I failed to keep momentum and my business flopped. I folded it a year after.

plam··on Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing
in one of the water cooler rooms in the canadian patent office, we have a wall of shame for patents like this. I remember one patent for a stick, and another for patenting the patent process.
plam··on Runaway complexity in Big Data... and a plan to stop it
more relational -> neo4j perhaps? not sure what you mean by rotational media
plam··on Software Engineering at Prismatic
where's the rss feed to subscribe to?
plam··on Clojure/core — Functional Relational Programming with Cascalog
Could you elaborate on #1 please? Wouldn't a distributed cache defeat the purpose of data locality of Hadoop? Regardless, I guess one could write a tap to Avout to enable this?
plam··on Clojure/core — Functional Relational Programming with Cascalog
What I particularly like about Cascalog is: 1) Composability 2) Unit testing 3) No installation as it is embedded in your jar.
plam··on Why Does Work Start At 9 A.M.?
Same as why everyone is using QWERTY keyboard when there's no scientific evidence that this particular keyboard setup is king.

The benefit of everyone using Qwerty, though, is apparent.

So same with 9am starts. So that the team is together at around the same time, for example. This can be overcome with proper communication channels as in a remote worker setup, but that's a special case.

Sometimes the effects can justify the means.

plam··on What Is a Data Scientist?
Quoting from the article,

"On one side, I’ve been working on building products, like the recommender system, Talent Match, modeling and finding ways to empower users to use LinkedIn through their products. Groups You May Like was another product I started.

The other side is finding interesting stories in the data. It’s exciting to be able to tell stories collected from the careers of 120 million professionals, and trying to learn what that data can tell us about the world at large. That has given us stories such as, “top times of year to be promoted,” “overused buzzwords” and “top CEO names.” Industries are ebbing and flowing, and there are a lot of insights about the world at large from people’s profiles when they are combined and aggregated."

plam··on What Is a Data Scientist?
From a 30k feet point of view, the difference is that a business analyst or data miner focus on answering questions with data; whereas, a data scientist focus on asking questions with data.
plam··on What Is a Data Scientist?
what's with all the resentments? A few years back, titles like UX designer, UI designer, front-end developer, and back-end developer were non-existent too. Aren't they all just designers or programmers?

As a maturing technology tree branches out, more and more specialists will be born.

plam··on The original Javascript impl was written in Lisp
sigh... the developer wanted to use Lisp, then management opted for Java. Typical.
plam··on Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’
I'm hesitant to build on these technology without information on the pricing.
plam··on Planes overhead
the program probably counts an airport as a flight path's end point. so none of the planes is counted as "in flight".
plam··on Ask HN: Best countries for international grad student to bootstrap a startup
Would incorporating a shell company and operating your startup inside a corporate entity be allowable in the UK?
plam··on Ask HN: Did you ever stop improving your programming?
Perhaps you're plateauing with your current domain or tools. Try other problems/languages and look back a few months later.
plam··on Ask HN: High priced Softwares?
That sort of lists is not readily available because enterprise software simply are not sold/marketed on the internet.

Secondly, developers of niche software don't publish their price because they'd be showing their hands to their competitors, which often compete with each other to bid for contracts.

plam··on Friday is my new Saturday
and the fact that you can enjoy the weekday lunch deals around
plam··on How the Payment Processing Industry in Canada is Halting Innovation
there's a Square clone in Canada already -- http://www.payfirma.com/solutions/mobile_solutions/iphone_mo...
plam··on Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
We don't know the full details. There're probably more going on in her life than just the stated incidents in this one article. Your argument, however, is blaming the victim for her unsolicited suffering.
plam··on Voices of finance: computer programmer at a trading company
funny that the feedback the interviewee got from his family on his follow-up commentary page is that everybody hates him
plam··on Duckhunt using HTML5 and Javascript
Custom level: 1000 ducks, 5000 bullets... Fire in the hole!
plam··on Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)
Flightcaster is even earlier. FC might have been the first.
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