rickmode

XML is not Turing complete, nor are most configuration file formats. Yet these are used to provide significant behavior. They are are programs. Programs are data. Data are programs.

The web page is unreadable on my iPhone. Right side is clipped; same as another post says about Android.

Time Machine via a drive hooked to an Airport Extreme along with Backblaze.

Interesting the part about non-interference:

"But Vecellio said it would go against Karisoke center policies and ethos to actively instruct the apes. 'We try as much as we can to not interfere with the gorillas. We don’t want to affect their natural behavior.'"

It's the Prime Directive in the 21st century.

I wonder if this is a at least partially due to the difference between gamers / geeks and the type of people that do PR. Perhaps the PR "normals" may not know the geek culture that deeply.

Not that there isn't sexism in geek culture either. I'm just genuinely curious if the PR types in the game industry are this colorblind.

Stated another way:

The contract Object.hashCode() does not require a stable results between processes; it _only_ requires a stable result during a single run of an application.

So if you need a stable distributed hash, the article recommends using a different method than Object.hashCode(), for instance DistributedObject.stableHash(). Using Object.hashCode() can bite you since not all implementations will have stable over multiple runs.

Is there no need to tune the number of threads with an approach like this? Or is there a general notion of the appropriate number of threads given the number of CPU cores?

Sounds like it was calculated by page count:

"Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native."

I can see that. It isn't explicit, but it is there.

Meta question: how is this related to hacker news (related to technology or science)?

"BlinkDB can execute a range of queries over a real-world query trace on up to 17 TB of data and 100 nodes in 2 seconds, with an error of 2–10%"

17 TB on 100 nodes? That a lot of nodes to hold 17 TB; on average 174 GB-ish of data each.

The speed is super impressive, but using 100 nodes makes this look more like a parallel processing achievement than "big data".

Usability observeration:

The auto-load feature effectively makes the footer impossible to read. Perhaps move the important footer information to the top or sidebar?

Clearly the patent is invalid: the Internet is represented as a bean, not a cloud.

A clear sign Intellectual Property has jumped the shark.

And your organization has much more than 3 teams? The article specifically says this is a large multi-team coordination issue.

A side point that came up at the time: if Apple offered no support, we'd mainly lose a good Swing implementation.

So without Apple's help, we could still use OpenJDK for non-GUI applications. I believe SWT would be fine as well, so Eclipse would remain viable.

Now with Apple contributing into OpenJDK, we have the best-case scenario.

The most striking bit: he found a Borders to sit at.

OK, just kidding. This post is a year old. Naive? Sure. Doesn't mean the sentiments aren't correct. I wonder how he's doing one year on.

The "just do it" theme is good to hear once in a while for those of us who have shelved their startup dream temporarily.

There one phone with iOS so if the context is phones, "Android competes with iOS" is exactly equivalent to "Android competes with iPhone".

You're saying this approach doesn't fit problem domains that are CPU-intensive. That's a valid point.

The article doesn't directly address this but does compare LMAX to a typical database backed business application. The computation here is not usually CPU-bound.

Hate the game, not the players.

And Google has adopted the same strategy. Corporations do not have any human sense of morals, fairness, or ethics much as mobs will commit crimes any individual in the mob would never consider. Groups do not think and function like individuals.

And we can't expect these for-profit groups to spend energy fixing the system. Any single company would be penalized compared to its peers if it spent time, people, and money lobbying governments for change.

The solution must be individuals and/or a consortium of some sort.

Side comment: The mobile version of that link was exceptionally painful. A short article was split to 5 pages. Wow.

Not all of it.

Minor point: this is a blog entry, not an article. I don't believe "The Economist" holds their blogs to the same standard as their articles. Certainly the voice and formality is more relaxed in their blogs.

Question 1

I find the font easier to read, but I became and avid reader after getting diagnosed and given private reading lessons in the 2nd grade (circa 1977). I suspect I retrained by brain with constant reading from that point onward.

By contrast, my sister who is 11 years older didn't get diagnosed young, and still struggles to read. Though she can read these days, she has a strong preference for audiobooks. When studying, she listens at 3x to 4x speed. Crazy fast. For personal reading she uses 1x to 2x.

Today here's what I can see (and since this is self reported, take it with a grain of salt):

a. I'm a slow reader compared to other avid readers. I read much faster than people that don't read often; I read about half as fast (or less) as my college friends that are avid readers.

b. For sentences or paragraphs displayed briefly (as happens in movies or TV shows), I get so worried about finishing the sentence, I often can't finish in the time the wording is shown. (So in this case I'm guessing I'm much slower than average.) I'd guess this is "test anxiety" [1]. Taking tests as a kid was torture. Example, I was relaxed taking my SATs and got 1250 (did it in one shot), for my ACTs, I was distracted and buzzing around in my head, and scored below the 50 percentile.

c. Answer "right / left" question is not automatic. I always have to think. I imagine pointing from my shoulder through my arm in the direction I'm thinking. (Perhaps every one does this.) I just know there's a small mental pause.

d. I struggle with unfamiliar but initial concepts or names. For example, when learning object-oriented programming, it took a bit for me to grok class vs object. Usually this forces a deep understanding, which in the end is great, but can be a slow learning process.

Question 2

I certainly read by whole words today. The problem (major difference) with dyslexics is the process of learning to read. When learning to read, dyslexics read in "chunks" and by word shape - basically seeing the word as whole, not the individual letters. I recall the uneven scanning. I also recall thinking "who the heck are these other kids learning this?" because I could see no rhyme or reason. AFAIK, kids normally clearly see the letters making up the words. I needed intense phonics training to "get" this.

Education (phonics training) is absolutely critical. Your "mouse"/"house" examples are exactly the kinds of intense flashcard things I went through. Day after day, card after card.

The Dyslexie font should be complimentary. I seriously doubt it would be a substitute. Many fonts explicitly emphasis readability - Dyslexie attempts to increase legibility for a non-standard brain type.

I think the font rocks, and I've love to get my hands on the font to live with it for a while.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Test_anxiety

In the US, limiting lobbying is tough (impossible?) without undermining the First Amendment right to petition.

I totally agree lobbying is a problem - perhaps one of the largest (along with our two party political polarization). A solution that doesn't break the US Constitution would be awesome.

(Edit: added second paragraph.)

Goals are a good think. Faith in your own ability to achieve your goals is good. Spending time dreaming about outcomes and then wasting time wishing the real outcomes did not happen and wishing things had been different and that you had done something different ... that's all counterproductive.

Zen is all about cutting out the BS in your mind. Living inside your dreams about what should be, what should happen and what should have happened is all bad thinking. It's illogical.

Zen helps become less wrong.

Regarding the ad the worked best, I couldn't tell what the heck the image was, and I'm curious - the image was interesting. Looks like a spiral of some sort. (I didn't see it as a stack of beer until I looked back after reading what it was.)

I suspect the higher click-through rate was more about curiosity about the image.

Ya. I was implementing an abstract class so gen-class was the only way.

Using Java classes and interfaces from Clojure is straightforward. Instantiating objects is easy. Implementing Java interfaces is easy. Both are fluid and feel idiomatic.

On the other hand, extending an existing Java class is quite awkward, requiring the use of gen-class, and does not (IMHO) feel idiomatic. I found the gen-class facility poorly documented. It also has a potentially small performance penalty due to an extra dereference (though in my testing I could not measure a meaningful difference between a gen-class object and a native Java implementation).

So Clojure is nice for using Java stuff from Clojure, however it becomes awkward for using Clojure stuff from Java.

You've described the very definition of the "greater fool theory" [1]. This is investing based on momentum rather than value (such as the price to earnings ratio). The intent is to sell to another "fool" after mading a profit. Of course it all comes tumbling down when the market runs out of fools [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania