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toby

1,226 karma · joined June 5, 2008

I am an author of programming books (most notably "Programming collective intelligence"), data geek, former developer at Google, engineering director at Reddit, and now Head of Engineering for MobileCoin.

Talk to me about coding, snowboarding or cocktails.

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toby··on Hypermodern Python
Rust?
toby··on Snowpack 2.0
n^0 is also an exponent. Do you consider constant time to be exponential growth?
toby··on Where Do Eels Come From?
I thought it was pretty fascinating to read the story of how obsessed scientists enlisted sailors to find smaller and smaller elvers to figure this out. The actual location isn't the interesting part.

I also had no idea that no one has ever seen them mate.

toby··on Rust Survey 2019 Results
Apologies, I was unable to delete my comment after I realized it wasn't appropriate here.
toby··on Rust Survey 2019 Results
Quick plug, my company released a lot of Rust code on Wednesday: https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/mobilecoin

The SGX and no_std support might be of particular interest to some of you.

toby··on Goat2Meeting
This is great!

My company has been getting musicians in our morning meetings on Zoom, it's really an awesome way to start the day.

Recommend checking out https://www.spresence.com/ if you're looking for talent (I am not affiliated)

toby··on The next outbreak? We're not ready. Ted talk by Bill Gates (2015)
I don't know why you're getting downvoted on this, the range they choose is super weird.

The actual report says that people under 19 comprise 2% of hospitalizations -- I doubt it suddenly jumps to 38% for the next 5 years. It also says there are no known fatalities of people under 19.

toby··on Spain's hospital IT systems under “massive attack” (in Spanish)
"We are not aware of any reports at this time of human illnesses that suggest COVID-19 can be transmitted by food or food packaging."

https://www.usda.gov/coronavirus

toby··on Rotary Cellphone
Oh wow, thank you for the memories :) I grew up in New Zealand when everything was pulse dialing and had an American modem that my father got us, so in order to dial any phone number I had to rewrite it by subtracting every digit from 10.
toby··on Nine-year-old child to graduate university
Galois is a very interesting historical prodigy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

Discovered group theory and died in a duel at 20. His work is very important to modern cryptography.

toby··on Mark Shuttleworth sees increased demand for enterprise Ubuntu Linux desktop
Can you explain this further? I've noticed that compiling a large project on a Mac is significantly slower than on a similarly-spec'ed Linux machine.
toby··on I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
OOP design is usually part of a CS curriculum (at MIT it was, at least) since it has some theoretical framing and applies to a wide variety of practical problems.

I don't think I've ever heard of a class in crypto scams or Agile.

toby··on Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law
Rolling a stop sign (slowly, if there's no one at the intersection) is safer on a bike than stopping. In SF the Board of Supervisors voted to make it legal, but the mayor vetoed it.
toby··on Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest
It switches between Sprint and T-Mobile, not sure if that makes a difference, I guess it depends where you are
toby··on Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest
Any reason you didn't consider Google Fi? I've been pretty happy with it.
toby··on 25M Brits would struggle in a cashless society
Fantastic comment, this is to me the crux of what makes privacy so important.

"How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?"

https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

toby··on College admissions scandal fallout: Stanford students sue UCLA, USC and Yale
Yep, which actually makes it better than most of the Ivy League :)
toby··on Hundreds of luxury Vancouver mansions being rented for cheap
A vacancy tax is so obvious that there must be some political reason that it's not being discussed in SF. I'm not sure I'd restrict it to foreign owners, holding empty property is a negative externality no matter where the owner lives.
toby··on The secret to champagne’s appeal is the physics of bubbles
You're right, it's not a brand, the correct term is appellation.
toby··on New Zealand Passes Law to Crack Down on Foreign Home Buyers
Vancouver has a vacancy tax, which strikes me as a really good idea to avoid these problems. Does anyone know why these aren't more popular?
toby··on Bus Drivers Working in Silicon Valley Struggle to Afford Rent
This is all true of course, but it's not what I said.

While it might be more economically rational for newer homebuyers to be the ones fighting development, it hasn't been my observation that they are. Obviously I could be wrong, I'd love to hear stories of rampant NIMBYism among the newly-landed.

toby··on Bus Drivers Working in Silicon Valley Struggle to Afford Rent
I think you'll find (in general) that the people most opposed to new housing (long time residents) are the ones paying the lowest property taxes, due to Prop 13.

Newer homebuyers who are paying taxes on the actual market-value of their homes tend to spend far less time at Supervisor meetings.

toby··on AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
By "advertiser guy we hate" you mean the publisher? The one who built the page you went to?
toby··on Amazon has made its first drone delivery to an actual customer
Any youth who can hit a small object 400ft away moving 50mph has far more lucrative options than drone theft.
toby··on A Bed for Fifty People?
I know :) But it seemed like a fun place to bring it up.
toby··on A Bed for Fifty People?
It's rare, but I know at least one person who has a San Francisco King (7x7, just like the city).

http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/hotstuff/article/S-F-7-b...

toby··on Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++
The Google C++ style [1] guide bans exceptions entirely and strongly advises against RTTI.

[1] https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

toby··on San Francisco Is Requiring Solar Panels on All New Buildings
Scott Wiener, the Supervisor who introduced the bill, also is far more in favor of density than many of the other supes. It's a harder sell here.
toby··on Some Starting Points for Deep Learning and RNNs
Appreciate the recommendation (I wrote that)! Honestly the book is very old at this point, it may still be an approachable way to understand what's behind the algorithms but there are much better ways to write the code now.
toby··on Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
So if they do well in the take-home test, you give them an offer? Or do they still have to do the all-day on-site after that?
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