Why on earth was my title replaced? Sigh.

Revolutionary memristors purposely delayed to prevent cannibalization of flash

It's 100% accurate and more relevant.

I am the one who originally added this sleep call to WebKit, when we first imported TCMalloc to use as our custom allocator. It was indeed there for a reason, but that reason is not applicable to WebKit's allocation patterns. TCMalloc was designed for a server workload, over time we have adapted it more to the unique needs of a browser engine. This change may help other operations, but probably not as much as the GC benchmark in question.

This is a human trafficking story.

Clearly this is not remotely as horrific as the usual connotations, but the structure of bait-and-switch coercion is very similar.

UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

"Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.

> "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up"

The devil is in the polishing up, evidently.

Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension.

Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you?

It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.

A link to the actual discussion is probably better, it includes some back and forth between Cox and Icaza as well as other comments: https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L...

I'm almost certain this must have been a communication issue within Samsung. Someone got it in their head that this group was hired to promote their product and told subordinates to deal with the group.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Hogwash. Haven't you ever read a novel or a news story or any kind of narrative? Details add color (uh-oh, I'm sure that'll get you riled up) and they help the listener understand context and picture the story in their head. How boring would life be if every time you read or heard anything negative about someone, it only referred to them as a human?

You can't solve prejudice and bias by pretending that people's race, gender, nationality, height, weight, shoe size, etc. don't exist. They do, they always will, get over it.

> Adding a column to 10 million rows takes locks and doesn’t work.

It does not take locks, other than for very briefly.

1. Make a new empty table that has the same structure as the table you wish to add a column to. Add your new column to the empty table.

2. Put triggers on the old table that, whenever a row is added or updated, makes a copy of the row in the new table or updates the copy already there.

3. Run a background process that goes through the old table doing dummy updates:

    UPDATE table SET some_col = some_col WHERE ...

where the WHERE clause picks a small number of rows (e.g., just go through the primary key sequentially). Since you aren't actually modifying the table, all this does is trigger the trigger on the specified rows.

4. When you've hit everything with a dummy update, rename the current table to a temp name, and rename the new table to the current table. This is the only step that needs a lock.

There are tools for MySQL to automate much of this. There was a post either here or on Reddit a while back about this which linked to them. I'm sorry but I didn't save a link to it so you'll have to search if you want it.

A basic understanding of statistics is sufficient to understand how this happens. Authorities have become obsessed with the idea of assembling giant DNA databanks of entire populations and then doing "cold hits" for unsolved crimes against the entire database.

The problem with this is that DNA testing is not 100% accurate, and when you test an entire population you're going to start getting false positives. The larger the population, the more false positives.

But then a jury may be told "there was a 100% DNA match" or that "There is a less than 1 in a billion chance that he is not the killer." And the wrong guy goes to prison.

Check out this other recent cold hit case. They took DNA samples from Occupy Wall Street protesters and then ran them against unsolved crimes files with no connection to the protesters just to see what they could get.

http://www.kens5.com/news/DNA-match-in-cold-case-murder-call...

So a protestor is arrested and charged for a 2004 murder based on this. Later found to be an error, but getting to that point assumes you can afford a good lawyer. There are lots of people getting charged for unsolved crimes they have no connection to. Not all of them can afford a lawyer and expert witnesses.

New York recently passed a law requiring DNA samples from all persons convicted of any crime, even misdemeanors such as loitering.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/15/148692189/n-y-passes-dna-requi...

There is a nationwide push for mass DNA collections. Other jurisdictions are pushing to take DNA of people who are merely arrested, regardless of whether there is a later conviction.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/crime-courts/2012-09-01/so...

> South Carolina’s law enforcement agency will soon collect DNA samples from people when they’re arrested for a felony – rather than post-conviction – four years after legislators passed a law requiring the state’s DNA database to expand.

This push to states even comes from the federal level:

http://www.acluofnorthcarolina.org/?q=congress-votes-expand-...

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.4614:

> In a 357-32 vote, the House voted to offer cash incentives to states that start taking DNA upon arrest for certain crimes.

It even has it's own lobbying group: http://www.dnasaves.org/

> Every day innocent people needlessly become victims of violent crimes. Most of these are committed by repeat offenders. By passing state legislation that enables law enforcement to collect DNA from felony arrestees, at the same time as fingerprints, your state can catch criminals sooner

There you can see that 26 states now mandate collection on arrest. More than half of the 50 states.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has ruled that DNA sampling on arrest, regardless of conviction, is permissible:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/dna-collection-mary...

The US has a nationwide database now that they do cold hits on, which is a statistically questionable process.

http://www.bioforensics.com/news/relatives_6-05.html

> Since the mid-1990s, the USA and the United Kingdom have maintained databases that use a series of such alleles to match DNA from unsolved crimes to known or suspected offenders. In the USA, states and the federal government keep DNA indexes of suspects and unsolved crimes, and share information through a computer system maintained by the FBI.

"Guilt by the Numbers: How fuzzy is the math that makes DNA evidence look so compelling to jurors?" by Edward Humes was an article that covered the problems here pretty well.

Original is gone, but here it is in cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cal...

More information about the case discussed in that article and the problems with the cold hit methodology: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/04/local/me-dna4

There are also various articles by DNA cold-hit advocates who claim it is invalid and cold-hits are a good practice, for example this article:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/science_law/2009/04/taking-...

Doing blind searches of samples on large DNA databases in order to find cold hits gives you a very high probability of a false match. A match that the falsely accused defendant will be quite difficult to challenge since there is a general belief by the public that DNA matches on a few markers are irrefutable proof of identity.

DNA can more strongly connect a suspect who is already known through other information. Doing blind searches isn't science and it isn't justice.

http://www.bioforensics.com/articles/Legally%20Scientific%20...

> For instance, if a DNA test capable of distinguishing between 'unrelated' people with one million to one confidence was used to create a database of two million personal profiles from a population of 20 million potential suspects you could be pretty certain that most crime stain profiles run against it would produce at least one cold hit.

> You could also be more than 90% certain that it would be the wrong cold hit. You could further expect that around 80% of the personal profiles on the database would match at least one other on record from a different person.

> Problems like these had led the 1996 National Research Council publication "The Evaluation of Forensic Evidence" (NRC-II) to recommend that "When the suspect is found by a search of a DNA database, the random match probability should be multiplied by N, the number of persons in the database".

On one side we have an argument that there are severe statistical problems with this. On the other side we have those who claim that is false and that the chance of any DNA match being wrong are so small as to be virtually impossible. Yet every year the number of false accusations and convictions from cold hits grows, as we see in this latest case.

I generate about $1K-$2K a month in passive income. I spend approximately zero hours on maintenance every week, and I bootstrapped it while holding down a full-time job. It took an extra 5-10 hours per week for about a year. Here's what I did:

a) Got a job at a major software company for very high comp. b) Spent an extra 5-10 hours a week working intelligently at my full time job; got promoted. c) Invested the salary, bonus, and stock from my high comp. corporate job in real-estate and tech-heavy index funds, and reap the (literal) dividends passively.

b) is optional; even without the promotion, I would still make enough money to generate almost all of my passive income via investments. Not bad for zero hours per week.

A stable income has allowed me to buy a house at the bottom of the housing market, which will appreciate at about 1% over inflation; my other investments typically do 2-8% over inflation (especially retirement funds, which grow tax-deferred). All in all, at least $1K per month, spiking to much more. At the rate I'm continuing to invest, I'll likely double that monthly return within 18 months.

Sure, this is all pretty volatile, but no more volatile than entrepreneurship, and with much better worse and average case scenarios.

Best of all, these investments will, in the long term, outpace inflation, which is more than can be said for selling software or tech stuff, which tends to depreciate in price over time (after all, the marginal cost of software is zero, which depresses prices due to competitive dynamics).

True story...

Client gives me a Help Desk Ticket. User claims batch job use to run in 5 minutes but now runs for hours. The logs confirm this. The commit logs show that an offshore programmer forgot to remove a 10 second sleep command from inside an iteration (for debugging I presume) before promoting to production. I removed it and got a 100X improvement in throughput.

My client said that now his user loves him; what did I do to fix it so fast?

When I told him that I removed the Sleep, he said, "No! No! No! Change it to a 5 second Sleep so I have something to give him the next time he complains!"

Haha, I love the use of the North Korean flag for "Isolation Mode".

This is a stupid article. The author makes the assumption that HP and Hynix COULD ramp to high volume production, however it is clear from HP's statement that this is not true:

"As with many other ground-breaking technologies being developed at HP Labs, HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products,"

Let me also say that I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years. Any organization that can scale better than its competitors will do so, unless they don't like making money. End of story. If HP and Hynix are not ramping to high volume, it's because they are not ready, not some stupid conspiracy theory that they want to stagnate the development of cloud-buzzword "technology".

I am a runner also (finished one marathon with a time that is nothing to write home about), and was looking forward to an interesting story. I read this whole article with a growing feeling of incredulity, not about the cheating that it describes (yes, I understand that there are confabulators of this type - Stephen Glass was already mentioned in the comments), but about the effort and space that a national magazine would spend on this story. I kept waiting for SOMETHING of momentous importance towards the end somewhere that would justify all this buildup, but it never came. Yup, a guy cheated in a bunch of races. Yup, he is a confabulator who will invent any number of details and fake personas to build up his fantasies. Yup, he was caught in due time. You could summarize this in five lines. This is not just beating a dead horse, this is shooting it with a howitzer, repeatedly.

The only truly interesting detail would be the method by which he cheated, which the reporter, at long last, admits that nobody has figured out. This leaves the possibility that other people are cheating the same way, although maybe less brazenly. Again, this could be summarized in a line (it's clear that he cheated, the method is difficult to figure out). What is this, a slow news year?

I liked the section titled "Good manners are not stiff, formal, or awkward." It reminded me of a story I was told of a dinner party at which one of the guests suffered from cerebral palsy. The host seeing that the guest was having trouble with her knife and fork immediately put down her own cutlery and started eating with her hands. Once the guest noticed this she felt she had leave to do the same. The story's a good example of "people over process".

This is called a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore. I think the author is understating the price, though. There's a lot of existing software you could reuse if your data was stored in more conventional relations, and "manually enforce consistency" is a pipe dream. Your code has expectations about your data, so in the abstract you do still have a schema, and not writing it down merely prevents any tools from helping you keep your data sane over time. I've seen Notes databases decay to the point that not even the dev team could explain how a document got into its contradictory state nor how the apps should (much less currently would) handle it. The few people diligent enough to do completely correct work without a checkable schema, aren't the people who would be tempted to try.

This is very nice, but it has the same flaw that most of the github résumé generators have: it only lists my own projects, not those from other people or organizations to which I (heavily) contribute, so it doesn't show the repos that get two thirds of all of my patches.

Does the github API not allow to query all the public repos to which I have commit access?

A little over $2700/mo with Planscope (https://planscope.io), my SaaS product that's been out since February. I'm averaging about a 8% growth rate month to month, so very excited about how things are going.

* Bootstrapped

* Raised my consulting rates to free up more time for products (= same amount of consulting income)

* Most new customers come via referrals from existing users and organic traffic (via targeted blog posts)

* Wrote a complementary book targeting people who aren't necessarily looking for PM software (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com), and upselling Planscope through that. Extremely successful so far.

A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that.

My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the profits are mostly being reinvested back into the company, so I don't think it qualifies as passive income.