adw

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The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots « The Urban Mashup Blog(urbanmashup.wordpress.com)
2 points by adw 15y ago|1 comments
422.
by adw 15y ago
This is an almighty big deal. I missed it (everyone was talking about distributed computing), but what Hadoop's done is make conventional BI providers look increasingly unimpressive. Systems like Storm are going to do the same - as the Twit
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by adw 15y ago
Or - and this is taking the opposite polemical position to yours - that designing systems without empathy is reprehensible. I lean more to the latter but that doesn't mean what you claim is entirely false either. It's not as simple as anyon
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by adw 15y ago
One extra issue: a bunch of startups concerned with splashover reputational risk (in extremis, and we are nowhere near this, 'why should I use/partner with/fund you, you're associated with bad actors so I don't trust you'. This isn't ration
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by adw 15y ago
I'm sorry, but It's not your call as to whether pg is objective or not. Like you, I'm sure we all think a lot of him, whether we've met him or not. But you just, at best, took agency away from someone who, it's totally reasonable to assume,
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by adw 15y ago
The founders hired the contractors. I don't think it's fair to call AirBnB spammers, and it's unreasonable to assume malice, but questions around oversight and transparency are reasonable ones to ask.
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by adw 15y ago
The only explanation I can come up with is that they're in at the deep end in a way they weren't expecting. It's happened to more grizzled operators than any of us – look at the family Murdoch right now – but as long as they give the impre
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by adw 15y ago
Scots law: age of consent (and age you can enlist) is 16, drivers license is 17, drinking and voting is 18. And this is Scotland, so the age of criminal responsibility is 12. (Until recently, it was eight: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotla
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by adw 15y ago
Thanks, and I totally agree. What I was really aiming for was "don't do yourself down" - and "don't underestimate the impact a well-placed tool can have".
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by adw 15y ago
Making the world better is a complex problem which depends on a hell of a lot of systems. Having worked in academia, you rapidly appreciate that the people who keep the lights on - administrators, lab techs, librarians - are about the most
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by adw 15y ago
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html to thread! Falls foul of - at least - points 16, 18 and 24. (Could anyone find any falsifiable predictions, for that matter?) On a more serious note, the quality of scientific debate on Hacker N
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by adw 15y ago
Obligatory link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_trick (aka: how do we make this linear classifier - typically a support-vector machine - nonlinear?)
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by adw 15y ago
Good point! I tend to think of the time value of money, loosely speaking "opportunity cost", as a sort of risk (the risk that you needed the money right now to go do something else with it), but that's a pretty idiosyncratic way to think ab
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by adw 15y ago
Debt is a mechanism for moving risk around - risk-averse parties (the people taking the loan) selling risk to risk-seeking parties (the lender). You're buying money now and paying interest, providing return, against which there's a chance i
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by adw 15y ago
Think of it as parasiting off the existing library of MySQL libraries for every language under the sun. It's why every key-value store speaks its wire protocol and also memcached.
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by adw 15y ago
[Disclaimer: I'm an officemate of Smarkets.] The reason for this is liquidity. You've got to have enough people interested in an event to get effective price discovery, and if you're making money on the commission then it's entirely about m
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by adw 15y ago
I believe RPython to be a proper subset of Python, and PyPy is written in RPython. You need to bootstrap off CPython to compile the compiler, of course!
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by adw 15y ago
Why should we accept unnecessarily abrasive behaviour as acceptable anywhere?
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by adw 15y ago
Not 1%-2% outright; 1%-2% extra over the equity bought.
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by adw 15y ago
XML parsing: lxml (lxml.html is particularly wonderful). Markdown/Textile; in the Python world people mostly use Restructured Text, not least because of its privileged position in docstrings.
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by adw 15y ago
Also: early stage investments are more aggressive than ever right now. The sums of money are relatively small, as are the number of market participants, so the risk of contagion isn't big in a macro sense, but it's potentially a real thing.
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by adw 15y ago
It's also - and this is geeky - a wonderful recursive argument for itself. It's a book about beautiful typesetting, typeset strictly according to its own rules, and it's beautiful. Isn't that terrific?
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by adw 15y ago
Yep. In fact, I'm fairly sure harmonies aren't protectable, just the top line, hence all the contrafacts (same chords, so same solos, but different themes) in jazz. There are hundreds of tunes on the Coltrane or Rhythm changes. Rhythms aren
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by adw 15y ago
It totally makes sense – he thought he was creating a transformative work. The score is identical in both cases, therefore you need a license. The analogy would be if you had a score that was inspired by, but transformed from, the origina
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by adw 15y ago
Because he didn't license the recording , he licensed the score . That's well-established; there are multiple rights in a piece of recorded music (the score, the lyrics and the mechanical rights to name three). So you can have multiple ri
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by adw 15y ago
One small competitor did, yes. One rather dominant one didn't. Amazon are, fair to say, a fairly significant threat...
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by adw 15y ago
30%-50% on $1bn is a really high return. The bigger the stakes, the lower the multiples. (That's why people use leverage.)
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by adw 15y ago
It's the perfect HN politics thread, practically speaking.
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by adw 15y ago
This is, however, kind of counterintuitive for most people. Principle-of-least-surprise suggests you could do something about this; split the dashboard, say, into projects you participate in (indicated by having committed) and projects you'
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by adw 15y ago
As they did with DabbleDB and Values of N (I Want Sandy). Both cool products, neither had overwhelming traction, both shut down when the deal closed.

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