smanek (u/smanek) - Readit News

smanek commented on Ask HN: What unknown technical blogs or sites do you read? · Posted by u/llambda

smanek · 13 years ago

Unknown is relative, but here are some of the rss feeds I'm subscribed too:

http://nosql.mypopescu.com/

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/

http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/blog.html

http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/

http://hunch.net/

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

http://www.softwarebyrob.com/

http://blog.mikemccandless.com/

smanek commented on Mona Lisa in 50 polygons, using a genetic algorithm (2008) rogeralsing.com/2008/12/0... · Posted by u/liamk

smanek · 13 years ago

I did something similar around 2008: (but in Lisp!): https://github.com/smanek/ga

Had to write my own bitmap processing library, since couldn't find anything fast enough off the shelf :-D Handled alpha blending, file i/o, etc (checkout the bitmap.lisp and color.lisp files in the repo).

Here's a video of it 'evolving' a picture of John McCarthy (best individual from each generation): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VFZ_ON0A8

And here it is doing the Mona Lisa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ZPSbImvFE

smanek commented on Mary Meeker Says We're Giving Up Our Possessions for the Internet wired.com/business/2012/1... · Posted by u/iProject

drusenko · 13 years ago

Could you elaborate on which of her predictions were wrong?

smanek · 13 years ago

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/...

She's often considered the face of the irrational exuberance behind the first dot com boom/bubble.

Rating many companies that subsequently lose 90-100% of their market cap as 'strong buys' is a pretty scary track record. IIRC, her portfolio of 'outperforms-or-better' lost ~80% of their value in one year.

Granted that the 'market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent', etc so she may not deserve all the scorn heaped on her (I haven't done the research to know ...)

smanek commented on Reddit Considering Accepting Bitcoin betabeat.com/2012/11/redd... · Posted by u/met3

Goronmon · 13 years ago

If a lay person were to ask how they get back their Bitcoins if they are stolen from their account, say due to a person gaining access to their computer, what do you tell them?

smanek · 13 years ago

If a lay person were to ask how they get back their dollars if they are stolen from their wallet, say due to a person mugging them, what do you tell them?

smanek commented on RedisToGo is now offering Redis Hosting in AWS US-West-2 blog.togo.io/news/redisto... · Posted by u/usiegj00

JonnieCache · 13 years ago

I don't want to be that guy making the pointlessly critical comment, but what is the use case for an in-memory database on the other side of an ethernet link? Even if you're in the same datacenter it's going to be slow, no?

I get that startups need to move fast in order to validate ideas, but redis is hardly a chore to set up.

Either way, congrats on the redundancy.

smanek · 13 years ago

A disk seek (e.g., if you have more data than RAM and are using virtual memory) might take ~10ms. A packet round trip within the same AZ in EC2 is <0.5ms.

smanek commented on How to get your IP unbanned on HN · Posted by u/pg

veemjeem · 13 years ago

There's also the usual engineer estimation: "Oh, it will probably take a day to rewrite the code. We'll deploy it and it will probably work just fine in production."

Any engineer that has live code has made this mistake before.

smanek · 13 years ago

Just to clarify, it will definetly take me more than a day to write/profile/test the changes (especially since I'll be learning arc in the process).

My hope is that it will only take a day or so to deploy it, once it's ready.

smanek commented on How to get your IP unbanned on HN · Posted by u/pg

smanek · 13 years ago

pg: I have fair bit of lisp dev experience. If, as a weekend project, I modified the HN src to use postgres and memcache would you consider using it in production? Obviously, I don't expect carte blanche prior agreement, but I wouldn't want to invest the time unless I thought it was plausible the work could actually help.

I would expect it to solve most of your performance problems for the foreseeable future (at the very least, by letting you scale horizontally and move the DB, frontends, and memcaches to separate boxes - plus ending memory leaks/etc by moving most of the data off the MzScheme heap).

The obvious downside is that it would use your (or someone at YC's) time. First to merge the changes I make to http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar into the production code, then to buy/setup some extra boxes and do the migration. We're probably talking, roughly, a day. It also has the unfortunate side effect of costing HN's src some of its pedagogical value, since it adds external dependencies and loses 'purity'.

Been looking for an excuse to learn arc for a while now ...

smanek commented on Degrowth en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deg... · Posted by u/wslh

jacques_chester · 13 years ago

Is long term growth qualitatively different from the integral of short term growth over the same period?

smanek · 13 years ago

I think so.

On a several decades/century scale it's worthwhile to funnel at least a few percent of GDP into basic science research[1]. But, in any given quarter/year, it's almost certainly a net loss. The trick being that every few decades, you'll get nuclear power, the transistor, etc[2].

Or, as a 'local' example: non-trivial number theory had basically no benefit for centuries but humanity kept 'investing' resources into it - which a short term optimizer wouldn't. Then, cryptography came along and it suddenly 'paid' for the entire field a dozen times over.

[1]: Research is sort of like early stage VC - but with funds that pay out over 70 years instead of ~7.

[2]: I would love to write about many more examples in much more depth, but will omit for the sake of brevity. I roughly feel like the newtonian mechanics was directly responsible for the industrial revolution, relativistic physics for the nuclear age, quantum mechanics for the computer age (with similar analogues in the biological sciences).

smanek commented on Diffie: Don't secure the internet, it needs crime zdnet.com/dont-secure-the... · Posted by u/matan_a

unicornporn · 13 years ago

These ideas sound a lot like one of the more amusing texts by Marx that I rediscovered just the other day. In Swedish it's called "brottets produktivitet" which roughly translates to "the productivity of the criminal".

With every crime a chain of business emerge where only first link is in itself criminal. For the internet security companies, graffiti removal services, security consultants, lawyers, anti-theft system resellers, locksmiths, insurance company and so on – it's business as usual.

I've found a part of text here: http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/deleon/pdf/1905/apr...

“A philosopher ‘produces’ ideas, a poet poems, a preacher sermons, a professor text-books, and so forth. A criminal ‘produces’ crimes. If we look more closely at the relation in which this branch of industry stands to society, not a few prejudices will drop. “It is not crimes alone that the criminal ‘produces’; he also ‘produces’ criminal legislation, and, as a consequence, he is also the first mover in the ‘production’ of the professors who ‘produce’ lectures thereon, along with the inevitable text-books in which these professors cast their lectures as ‘goods’ on the markets of the world. . . . “Furthermore, the criminal ‘produces’ all the criminal and correctionary branches of society—police, judges, hangmen, juries, etc., besides all the several branches of industry demanded by these, and all of which constitute just so many categories in the scale of social labor, develop different faculties of the human mind, create new wants and new means whereby to satisfy them. . . . “The criminal ‘produces’ an impression—good or bad, as the case may be. He thereby ‘renders a service’ to the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public. It is not only text-books on criminal legislation that the criminal ‘produces’; he ‘produces’ not merely the penal law itself, and consequently the legislators of that law. He also ‘produces’ art, literature, novels, even tragedies as shown by the appearance of Mullner’s Tanjte, Schiller’s Robbers, the Oedipus, and Richard III. The criminal breaks the monotony and humdrum security of bourgeois life, he thereby insures it against stagnation, and he arouses that excitement and restlessness without which even the spur of competition would be blunted. Thus the criminal furnishes the stimulants to the productive forces.”

smanek · 13 years ago

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