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jaydubon Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers

I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years more tech savvy employers require/allow employees to bring their own computer. With better "type 1" hypervisors, you could have your Home OS image and your Work OS image running at bare metal speeds with the ability to simply flip between the two.

Employers could save money and employees could do whatever they wanted on their "home" OS.

jaydubon Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

kids today are learning just as much... at higher levels of abstraction

When the learning begins at a higher layer of abstraction, some knowledge is necessarily left-out. Perhaps it is done so for valid reasons such as relevance as you mentioned. However, to master a point at a high level in any stack you do need to understand or appreciate the lower levels as well (which might be harder for kids today).

jaydubon Google Voice Speech Recognition Not Really Working

As Voice matures and more people use it Google will continually get a larger dataset to draw information from. Perhaps it could feed into a better probabilistic transcription approach in the veins of Google Translate.

jaydubon Ask HN: What kind of index is Google using here?

If I understand correctly (a big if) and the underlying structure is something along the lines of a giant suffix tree then searching for any particular string takes time asymtomtically equivalent to the length of the query string. What if there were another corresponding "meta-data" suffix-tree perhaps this would allow the fast abstract search. what if the nodes contained meta-data such as length/type etc instead of merely containing the data itself.

jaydubon Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it

I understood the article to be focusing on Microsoft vs. Google in terms of their approach to the same set of challenges in the web sphere. ("Google has questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure")

In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains (versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).

jaydubon Bead sort: faster than O(N log N) sort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort

jaydubon Do you get less wet if you run in the rain?

Also, chances are that you kick up water as well

jaydubon Wolfram Alpha Architecture

For co-located servers who pays the energy bill?

jaydubon Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?

Guessing randomly you have a 50% chance of being right. Weight the odds based on a few rules of thumb and voila?

jaydubon Stack Overflow DevDays

Alternatively, you can grab the Bolt Bus, or others like it (https://www.boltbus.com/default.aspx). Cheaper and slower than Amtrak but apparently has decently usable wifi.

jaydubon Ask HN: Any web app suggestions for project management?

I'm currently using the free version of Zoho Projects. Works well for our purposes: http://projects.zoho.com/

jaydubon What database would you use to store (min) 10 billion objects?

but the size of the problem in total bytes may be more of a problem than the actual looking up and indexing of the data.

One cool property of such a large data-set (~200TB) is that you are pretty sure to see a lot of the same data repeated.

It'd be neat to try reduce the overall data footprint by assigning some sort of signature to repeats. I.e. if you are storing the sequences (let's imagine for a sec that these are non-trivial sizes) ABC, ABCD, ABCDE and ABCDEF , replace ABC with say #1 etc. and perhaps save a whole lot of space.

jaydubon Business Plan Competitions

Very true, although perhaps what Steve is trying to say here is that the opportunity cost of a business plan is (in his experience) a lot higher than most people think. Maybe you win several thousand dollars, however, if you spent that energy on developing an actual business you'd likely be much closer towards the realization of your goal.

"I have seen students spend well over a year refining a business plan competition pitch" - I think this is his main gripe. If you can do it without much additional effort why not.

jaydubon ChunkHost offering free xen vps for beta testers

Is this site legit?

For potential beta testers: It might be a good idea to hold off on registering until we hear back from Chunkhost on the status of their service.

jaydubon Simple & Not Social Bookmarking Service

I really like the design and clean interface. One minor comment: you may want to change that green button to read: "Register for free" instead of "Registration for free"

jaydubon Ask HN: Zillow is trying to acquire my app + domain for "a couple hundred bucks", advice?

It's an interesting scenario, as several people have pointed out: In one sense they have supreme leverage in that they have power over the API etc. At the same time, they have a reputation/brand to protect (damage to which could cost a whole lot more than $250). They've clearly come on strong, adding the threat of discontinuing your access to the API as a pressure cooker.

Ignoring the artificial pressure that they've added, what real incentive is there to accept this deal straight off? $250 isn't a game-changer -- Zillow knows that too. Fight for what you think it's worth.

jaydubon Ask HN: Overcoming the GIL in Python

Stackless is the opposite of what he wants

The quote above does mention that "[Stackless] does not however allow you to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources. It simply allows you to squeeze the most amount of work out of a single threaded process...".

Depending on the application and its particular implementation, actually Stackless could be the right solution. Which is why I brought it up. In fact, it now looks as though he might go with Stackless, just like EVE online did :)

jaydubon Ask HN: Overcoming the GIL in Python

This may be of interest:

"Stackless Python allows you to use lightweight threads (tasklets) that can be switched with less overhead and it allows for cooperative multitasking with the intention of making async programming easier. This helps with IO bound applications where you can have tens of thousands of tasklets running at the same time (try doing that with threads). It does not however allow you to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources. It simply allows you to squeeze the most amount of work out of a single threaded process..."

http://www.stackless.com/pipermail/stackless/2007-August/001...

jaydubon How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood

I tried to submit that link, but it only redirects to the original article. Perhaps they're checking that the referrer is sciam.com to display the printer-friendly version...

jaydubon Ask HN: Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming?

I agree with mjgoins.

If you are motivated to do some self learning, here is a link to a course offered at UMD on Discrete structures: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2006/cmsc250/note.html

Check out the "Notes" (lecture slides), homework, quizzes, exams (all of which have the solutions posted).

Also, check out the syllabus and you can find the readings in the textbook: Discrete Mathematics with Applications by Susanna Epp. (Google Shopping: http://tinyurl.com/d99nb9)

jaydubon Ask HN: playin' the stocks game

Also by Taleb "The Black Swan"

jaydubon Ask HN: Which school do you attend?

University of Maryland, College Park

jaydubon Ask HN: Y Combinator Wiki?

Check out epi0Bauqu's site http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/

jaydubon Private firm may track all email and calls in UK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy see Phil Zimmerman's Why I wrote PGP article

jaydubon Ask YC: Let's start a Hacker News book club

I just came across http://goodreads.com last night, looks interesting

jaydubon Ask HN: What to read during the holidays?

If you enjoy history you may want to read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (historical fiction). I loved it.

jaydubon Ask HN: Interesting recent developments in academic computer science.

I'm a part of the XMT project @ UMD http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~vishkin/XMT/index.shtml

Admittedly, the concepts involved are dated since PRAM theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Random_Access_Machine) dates to the 70's. However, this project marks the first successful commitment of PRAM theory to silicon

jaydubon The other half of "Artists Ship"

This past summer I worked as an intern for a big company. On the first day of orientation the head of the legal compliance department said very flatly to us that any individual could do far more harm to the firm than good.

This mentality, reenforced by the company's bureaucratic change management system, really did not sit well with me.

Fortunately for my summer experience, my "buddy"/summer mentor and I found a loophole which we used to "hack" the change management system so that once we got our initial approval, we could propagate changes to prod without running through the whole process again for each change (which otherwise would have been required).

jaydubon Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads

I have a friend with whom I've enjoyed discussing this very topic.

One interesting remark he made: the way people consume "news" will likely change in a fundamental way. Traditionally, the unit of news has been the article. This approach worked well for print and has been widely adopted online as well. Perhaps the future of journalism will be the abandonment of the article, focusing instead on a more concise approach that delivers rapid-fire, credible, news.

jaydubon If Richard Branson Ran GM

Well, it can be hard to hear over the roar of private jets