marcusf

You can, just hide the tags that you don't want to see. "Ignored Tags", top right on the home page.

I'm still not sure how this solves the personalization use case. Usually (I think) the main problem is rendering the page, not pushing it down the wire. So if you still need to render for each request for a personalized page to make sure it's not been updated, where's the gain?

I think I might be slow, but I'm not sure where the wins are here and how you overcome the personalized rendering problem? I'd love for you to talk a bit about it.

The entire media space, for example? TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, …

But they were never mass market in the same way. Walk on to the tube today and 70% will have their noses buried in an iPhone (or less often, a 'droid). That wasn't the case with either PDA's or pocket TV's. Possibly with walkmans/iPods.

Thanks very much! Might be finally time to cough up the dough for TAOCP then and take it from there.

Just an amateur, so speculation abound. But presumably, on the basis that other investors that you hope will value it higher will use the P/E ratio as a metric as well, and that it gives a comparative metric between "similar" companies. E.g. it's an often used metric just because it's an often used metric.

Probably based on experience, it wasn't like that initially if I remember correctly.

I find stuff like this terribly interesting, so please elaborate. Any journal or so that is recommended for someone curious?

I remember Swedens first social network, StajlPlejs, started at 96 and changed name to LunarStorm in 2000. Had about 20% of Sweden on that site. Well before 2004.

I've gone through my fair share of Apple HW. I'll agree it's not without its failures. Broke a Powerbook G4 logic board, a MBP screen and one old iPod (abt 30% of what I've owned of Apple HW). What I've found which makes me happy though is they've always fixed it without charge and with no AppleCare, at least so far. I'll admit to only owning my own custom built PCs (and Nokia & SE phones) before that, at least for 10 years prior so I've nothing to compare with.

(Also an EE by education if not by trade, though that doesn't really count here)

The commenter you responded to did provide a case for Apple trying to fix that though, didn't he? I'd expect it to be rolled out across the next refresh of the product line. Might be naive?

As opposed to vocational coding/programming/hacking. Seems like you're being facetious for the point of it?

I don't think you truly believe that though. Most people who hack daily have at least a basic working model of the computer. There's a compiler parsing, generating code, there's possibly a VM executing bytecode, an operating system managing memory, scheduling, network and other services, below that there's a CPU executing some representation of assembly code, it's in turn composed of some sort of a logic array, etc. etc. I'm not saying you know the inner workings of everything.

It's more along the lines of, we teach physics with the aim that people finishing high school should have a vague notion about at least newtonian physics, some electromagnetism and the scientific model. For computers, we teach how to open Word, check your e-mail etc. Stuff kids know. What they don't know is how this all ticks, and I think there is certainly value in helping kids construct a vague mental model of it all, and how to apply certain parts of it to a screen they'll probably interact with 4-16 hours per day for the rest of their lives.

I doubt Bloomberg uses eight grade chemistry, biology or physics in his day job either. We still teach the sciences -- if nothing else than as a way to entice kids to continue studying it and keeping a steady influx of engineers in to society. There is nothing different about computation, per se. Instead of a teacher droning on to kids about how to surf, let them learn how to do webpages, or robots. Get them excited about CS and try to disspel the notion that the machine they're sitting by is in any way, shape or form magical and archaic.

As for Bloomberg at this phase in his life picking up coding, probably not. On the other hand, he made his fortune in part via hardware and software, so I doubt he's completely clueless about it even now.

Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190363560457647...

[2] http://www3.cfo.com/article/2012/2/banking-capital-markets_g...

[3] http://blogs.smeal.psu.edu/grumpyoldaccountants/archives/530

[4] http://www.scalefinance.com/accounting-finance-and-groupons-...

[5] http://blog.agrawals.org/2011/09/24/groupons-cost-of-revenue...

[6] http://takingpitches.com/2011/06/04/groupon-s1-ipo-marketing...

Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.

So revenues up from $295m to $559m and operating income from -$146mn to $-12mn. Managing to grow revenue while narrowing the gap to black by quite a margin, good on them. I just wish they would quite re-stating the non-GAAP numbers. What value do they have beyond letting the press release have a dubious headline?

I just spent an inordinate amount of time reading up on LSH for images. In the system we develop, people tend to upload images from their desktop time and again instead of searching in the system. Part of it is a UI challenge, we have to make search better. But in the case of them uploading the same image repeatedly it would be good to be able to do some kind of LSH and see if the image is already in our database (like TinEye). I started out with LSH via random projection [1] and got further down the rabbit hole from there.

What stumped me was creating a good enough feature vector, balancing size with information. We have a hack day tomorrow, might pick it up again.

[1] https://engineering.purdue.edu/~malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008(LSH...

That was my first reaction as well, but I'm going to leave cynicism to the side here. Faking cancer is ways and leagues beyond faking a CS degree and I just don't want to spend the energy required to believe anyone would do that.

Cancer is never well timed, but this has to takes the cake. The perils of public life?

Thyroid cancer took my father at about the same age; I truly feel for Scott Thompson and his family and hope they found it early and for his speedy recovery.

I've worked with one or two of those (out of about something like a hundred, I'd guess). Both came from technology and had engineering degres but had figured out they preferred sales. I'm not sure that's the sole reason, but they really did grok how our solutions worked, what benefits they offered and how to map that to the customers desires and idiosyncrasies.

I've only followed this case at a bit of a distance, but it seems to me that Judge William Alsup is a fantastic jurist, and very amusing at that.

Yeah, I admit the metaphor was weak. I wanted to head to lunch. I was thinking a flock of wolves requires a different gun than a single bear unless you want to be flooded in wolves.

But if that's the information you're after, why ask for golf balls and busses? These are real world quantities with decidedly different qualities than whatever appears in standard computing scenarios. Describing how you'd go about troubleshooting a three layer architecture with inordinate network load on the database might be a better question then?

Walking around in general felt painful - For example: I got stuck getting in to the first cave because I was standing on the wrong spot, so I had to walk around a bit to move forward, though the environment really didn't give me any clues that was the case.

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again.

Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you're solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They're completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I've usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don't wreak unnecessary havoc on it.

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2...

I'm not fond of brain teasers either, but small, self-contained questions have value. Often if they're simple enough you can use them in many interviews and establish a base line (if the candidate did a, b or c she will usually work out, if she took route d, that betrays a weakness in X etc).

This is not a replacement for evaluation of a candidate on their own merits, and having a good in-depth technical conversation. But I like having something to ground my evaluations in as well and make them even slightly comparable.

For reference, I do the same thing when I get interviewed; I have a few questions I ask any prospective company so I have some comparative way to evaluate them. Never bad to try to have some metrics in your process.

This is very cool -- I love that we're seeing more and more open source work on making web game engines that are not Flash. Stuff like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope were very cool, and it's good to see more frameworks and libraries for taking some of the effort out of it and making it more mass-market.

One thing that excites me especially is that a simple game creation engine in the browser might be a great chance to excite kids about programming with a very low barrier to entry.

I must've missed the build up for all of this because all I got was a very, very buggy interface and two floating guys insulting me and I didn't get it.

That said, I did enjoy SpaceQuest as a kid -- looking at Wikipedia, I wasn't more than 10 when the last game came out. It seems like Kickstarter has become a mechanism for making me feel old.

We charge a bit upwards of 1000 EUR per day for our senior consultants, here in Stockholm. We have had people who jumped ship and still charge that independently. With 80% workload, that works out to about 220 000 USD a year (With one month off). So it's not completely unheard of for a senior self-employed contrator.