kia

Drinks is the biggest revenue source for fast food chains.

Abstract:

We use a large dataset of play-by-play NBA data to determine when yanking foul-plagued starters is optimal by applying insights and tools from finance. We find that a team performs significantly worse if a starter with foul trouble is allowed to remain in the game, and that this effect is strongest in the third quarter. We use a novel win-probability technique that is sufficiently general to be useful for other questions simply by appropriately redefining the state variables. Thus, our two contributions are to introduce the new approach and also to demonstrate its usefulness by solving the problem of early foul trouble that had remained unaddressed in the academic literature.

I agree. The fact that you don't hear about an old big company that often doesn't mean it's dead. It has found it's business model and doing well in some not-that-hyped sector.

On the other hand, the fact that you hear about 'new-hot-startup' on all hi-tech sites doesn't mean it'll survive it's first year.

The issue of "mass-man" affecting the society has been well described in Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses"

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/revolt.pdf

The more unbelievable the rumor is the faster it spreads.

Here is a recent thread about index funds

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949158

tl;dr Before IPO Google made several seminars so it's employees can get investment advice on how to invest their future millions. The advice was to invest in index funds.

In the submitted article they are talking about officially registered record.

Albert Einstein:

"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned."

Learning only things you think you'll need (e.g. coding) limits your thinking considerably. I always find it amazing how knowledge from absolutely unrelated fields helps me to solve specific problems.

"The market value of Goldman Sachs is just $88 billion. I'd take more than half that company over the whole of Facebook any day of the week."

GS was founded in 1869; Facebook in 2004.

Isn't DRM on noninteractive content (not games) doomed to failure?

I think working late at night is not very good for you and your productivity. It's better to work 8 hours at 100% capability then 16 hours at 50%. Try to go to sleep early and do all the important stuff in the morning after sleep when your head is fresh.

Does anyone here switched from Emacs to Vim? Comments?

He is talking about Google-size companies.

I think evolution of open source software resembles evolution in biology. There are many dead or one developer projects, but like in biology the projects that are actively developed and have many contributors are usually the strongest ones. They survived the competition with hundreds of other projects before they became what they are now.

If there really was an offer then I think it's the biggest mistake Groupon's founders ever made.

Here is an article on Wikipedia about utilized algorithm:

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

Works on Firefox 4b7.

This is someone's master thesis from 1998

Here is an abstract for those who don't want to download the full PDF

In this paper I describe the design, implementation, and features of ML/OS, an operating system with an embedded ML compiler. ML/OS supports a continuation-based thread model of concurrency with non-blocking, interrupt-driven input/output. By embedding the ML compiler into the operating system, ML/OS attempts to eliminate levels of abstraction that are present in traditional interactions between compilers and operating systems. By using a continuation-based scheduler, I demonstrate the use of advanced programming language features such as continuations and type safety in system-level programming.

The funny thing is that BTRFS is developed by Oracle. ZFS was developed by Sun. Now when Oracle bought Sun they have two more or less competing filesystems. What are they going to do about this? Are they going to make ZFS GPL or cancel the development of one of these?

From my experience full body scanners are much faster and more convenient compared to traditional system when you take off your shoes and go through metal detector. If you are unlucky an airport worker additionally scans you with a hand metal scanner. With full body scanner you just enter the cabin and voila! The scan takes 3 seconds.

GPUs are good for algorithms with simple control flow (take conventional rendering where you basically does simple processing of huge amounts of vertices and pixels). If you have an algorithm with complex control flow (e.g. ray tracing, most problems in science) you will have to code really hard to achieve even 50% of peak. You can usually do something with an algorithm which is good for GPU but not optimal overall. So you have 30x speedup on GPU compared to CPUs but the scaling of this algorithm is worse then its more complex variant on CPU (e.g. O(n) vs O(log(n))). In the end many of these speedups are just marketing.

Moreover GPUs have problems with double precision floating point numbers which are a must for most scientific problems (though sometimes you can utilize mixed precision approaches -> estimate in single precision, then get a correction in double).

Another problem is having ECC (error correction). You don't want to run a computation for a week to find out that it crashed because of data corruption. Latest generation of Teslas has ECC, consumer cards don't.

By the way Go is one of the most challenging games for AI:

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

Why did they decided to cut the graphic at 400,000 years before today? Maybe that's because a couple of million years ago the concentration of CO2 was well above today's level?

By the way here is another picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_CO2_with_glaci...

Here is more crazy way of saving bandwidth:

Enable gzip in SSH -> SSH to some machine that has unlimited Internet access (if you have one; AWS etc.) -> Use text browser from there (Elinks is nice - http://elinks.or.cz/).

This will allow you to browse Internet with bytes of traffic.

I am a linux fan. But I must admit that C#/.net/VS is one of the best development platforms available. Besides that they have just released F# with VS2010 which is kind of 'Language for Geeks' in MS world.

Landfill space is not unlimited. I understand that you are talking about US, but some countries (Japan) have huge problems with space.

The less you have the more you should think about doing things right.

Reminds me the movie Inception.

This one gives a rough estimate for chances of being successful. I am surprised that even for Y Combinator funded companies it's rather small (when looking only at exits) considering the fact that PG says being acquired is almost always the way to go. It's interesting to know how the rest of the companies are doing (how many are profitable).

Official project page:

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/MovieReshape/

Single page:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/reinventing...