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spencermountain

17 karma · joined February 19, 2013

javascripter from toronto
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spencermountain··on System – A resource that aims to explain how everything in the world is related
Is the pope catholic, or statistically related to catholicism? Is Chicago related to Illinois by published evidence? Thank you, and congrats on the launch. I loved freebase, and desperately want it back. If this works, please don’t sell.
spencermountain··on Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019)
hi Brian, thank you for your work and your response. You've chosen to work on the world's most important and difficult project, and for that you should be thanked every day. Apologies if my tone was off, or criticisms too harsh. cheers
spencermountain··on High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India
to summarize, crop pesticides are converted to glucose internally, causing diabetes.

a pretty big plot-twist for a delirious problem in global health, and a find that resembles a 21st century silent-spring.

spencermountain··on 2038: Only 21 years away
for the others curious, seems javascript handles dates with 64-bit floating points, which have a maximum of 9007199254740991.

The highest date I could make with node+chrome was 'Dec 31 275759', which cozies-up pretty close to that (8639977899599000)

spencermountain··on The Story of Firefox OS
thanks for sharing this. It was nice to see this week with the lumia launch, how many people want a low-stress mobile phone, that doesn't beep, and doesn't track your every move. b2g could have been amazing to a mobile industry that feels shallower each quarter.
spencermountain··on Google Improves Image Search with Freebase Identifiers
It's cute to seeing freebase ids surfaced in all sorts of projects. It's incredible how powerful and useful that project is.

Interestingly, those mids are hashes of an earlier id system, which itself sourced from (i think,) wikipedia/en titles. There's kind of an accidental archaeology happening, from the anonymous hard-work of many smart people.

spencermountain··on Supercomputers surprisingly link DNA crosses to cancer
i completely agree. The dna-data metaphor has been a huge, decades-long mistake, and with the state of things today, it's clear we have massive errors in our assumptions.
spencermountain··on Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web
this is a very impressive project; also a humiliation of the field of computer science.