smanek
Joined 19 years ago
Karma
8,005
Submissions
1,190
Member since
Oct 10
Recent submissions
Comment · 14 years ago
Unknown is relative, but here are some of the rss feeds I'm subscribed too:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/
http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/blog.html
http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/
Comment · 14 years ago
I did something similar around 2008: (but in Lisp!): https://github.com/smanek/ga
Had to write my own bitmap processing library, since couldn't find anything fast enough off the shelf :-D Handled alpha blending, file i/o, etc (checkout the bitmap.lisp and color.lisp files in the repo).
Here's a video of it 'evolving' a picture of John McCarthy (best individual from each generation): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VFZ_ON0A8
And here it is doing the Mona Lisa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ZPSbImvFE
Comment · 14 years ago
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/...
She's often considered the face of the irrational exuberance behind the first dot com boom/bubble.
Rating many companies that subsequently lose 90-100% of their market cap as 'strong buys' is a pretty scary track record. IIRC, her portfolio of 'outperforms-or-better' lost ~80% of their value in one year.
Granted that the 'market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent', etc so she may not deserve all the scorn heaped on her (I haven't done the research to know ...)
Comment · 14 years ago
If a lay person were to ask how they get back their dollars if they are stolen from their wallet, say due to a person mugging them, what do you tell them?
Comment · 14 years ago
A disk seek (e.g., if you have more data than RAM and are using virtual memory) might take ~10ms. A packet round trip within the same AZ in EC2 is <0.5ms.
Comment · 14 years ago
Just to clarify, it will definetly take me more than a day to write/profile/test the changes (especially since I'll be learning arc in the process).
My hope is that it will only take a day or so to deploy it, once it's ready.
Comment · 14 years ago
pg: I have fair bit of lisp dev experience. If, as a weekend project, I modified the HN src to use postgres and memcache would you consider using it in production? Obviously, I don't expect carte blanche prior agreement, but I wouldn't want to invest the time unless I thought it was plausible the work could actually help.
I would expect it to solve most of your performance problems for the foreseeable future (at the very least, by letting you scale horizontally and move the DB, frontends, and memcaches to separate boxes - plus ending memory leaks/etc by moving most of the data off the MzScheme heap).
The obvious downside is that it would use your (or someone at YC's) time. First to merge the changes I make to http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar into the production code, then to buy/setup some extra boxes and do the migration. We're probably talking, roughly, a day. It also has the unfortunate side effect of costing HN's src some of its pedagogical value, since it adds external dependencies and loses 'purity'.
Been looking for an excuse to learn arc for a while now ...
Comment · 14 years ago
I think so.
On a several decades/century scale it's worthwhile to funnel at least a few percent of GDP into basic science research[1]. But, in any given quarter/year, it's almost certainly a net loss. The trick being that every few decades, you'll get nuclear power, the transistor, etc[2].
Or, as a 'local' example: non-trivial number theory had basically no benefit for centuries but humanity kept 'investing' resources into it - which a short term optimizer wouldn't. Then, cryptography came along and it suddenly 'paid' for the entire field a dozen times over.
[1]: Research is sort of like early stage VC - but with funds that pay out over 70 years instead of ~7.
[2]: I would love to write about many more examples in much more depth, but will omit for the sake of brevity. I roughly feel like the newtonian mechanics was directly responsible for the industrial revolution, relativistic physics for the nuclear age, quantum mechanics for the computer age (with similar analogues in the biological sciences).
Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
The ones on memory hierarchy (cache oblivious algos, etc)
Comment · 14 years ago
For algo/datastructures, CLRS (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...) is the gold standard.
For OS's, Tanenbaum (http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Operating-Systems-Andrew-Tanenb...) is popular.
'Math' is broad - if I can recommend only one book to cover all of Math I'd probably say 'The Road to Reality' (http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Reality-Complete-Universe/dp/...). More practically (for the subset of math most programmers are likely to care about), you'll do fine with one good discrete math book and one linear algebra book. Throw in one each on Stats, Abstract Algebra, Calc (up to ~diffeq), and Real Analysis (in roughly that order) if you're a bit more ambitious ;-)
Comment · 14 years ago
also offtopic: 'voracious vocabulary' probably doesn't mean what you think ;-) (you're probably thinking 'voracious reader')
I like to use HL Mencken as inspiration.
I've worked on a few fun projects, including satellite defense for the DoD, a couple of big Lisp webapps, and large distributed systems.
If you need to reach me: {myusername}@gmail.com
Some of me online:
My PGP Key is at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9526096E