Brendan’s comments from 2012 on the #JS #leading-commas controversy and Crockford being a whiny child about JSMin
Violet Blue on Jake #Appelbaum and #rape
A #vegan hamburger based on transgenic yeast generating heme using a soybean gene
space #war between satellites. Mentions rumors that the #Tianjin explosion was a space-based attack from the US
an SRO destroyed by, probably, #arson for #gentrification, in #San-Francisco, at Mission and 29th
Sam Altman speaks out against #Trump despite saying he agrees with him about some important issues
Cody Brown speaks out against Peter #Thiel and his destruction of Gawker, which has a #Trump aspect (Thiel’s lawyer just filed a new lawsuit against Gawker for investigating Trump’s hair or wig or whatever it is)
a functional dialect of #Prolog with low-noise syntax
A successful clinical trial for #Alzheimer patients, using some kind of complicated therapy with a bunch of drugs and diet and whatnot
Robin Hanson’s division of people between foragers and farmers.
an overview of Robin Hanson’s thinking
Yosef Kreinin talks about programmers who are like foragers (or pastoral nomads) and those who are more like farmers (or settlers).
The #Anil-Dash perspective on how online #abuse and #public-shaming happen
One of the key announcements in the #Ethereum #DAO catastrophe
an update on the state of the art of #reinforcement-learning by #Karpathy. #AI #deep-learning #machine-learning #toread
A 15-hour #video #MOOC on #machine-learning from 2014 with an #ebook
an overview of "generative models" such as #DCGANs. #machine-learning
18-year-old US citizen Ashley Cervantes suffered a seven-hour #rape by the border patrol, who then billed her US$575 for it
There are a lot of jobs in Java, and half as many in C++, .NET, or Python.
Laos is a new sex tourism destination because #Thailand’s military dictatorship is cracking down on #prostitution after a STI epidemic with 19% of Bangkok prostitutes HIV+.
#video of the “no contact jacket”, which is a high-voltage stun gun built into a jacket so that you can escape people who try to grab you
#Systemd is apparently a project run by idiots; here Paul Wouters explains some of the inadequacies in its attempt at DNS
Humanity’s historically biggest gathering up to 2016 was the 2013 Kumbh Mela, with 61 million people; 25 million on the peak day. Next one is in 2025.
On #Appelbaum
On #Appelbaum in German
Fresco and Batata are our first two commercial nanosatellites; 800mm×400mm×400mm, made by #Satellogic
“Measuring the Magnification of Homemade Simple Microscope Lenses” using a laser-projected grid from an electron microscope. “The EM grids I bought were Veco 75 mesh copper grids with a center reference from Ted Pella, Inc. (cat # 12555-CU) and cost $15.90 for a vial of 100.”
Charity Majors explains what “operations” means and how “ops culture” is changing.
Work on Coyotos stopped when Jonathan Shapiro moved to Microsoft, and BitC “isn’t going to work in its current form”, because of “1. The compilation model, 2. The insufficiency of the current type system w.r.t. by-reference and reference types, 3. The absence of some form of inheritance, and 4. The instance coherence problem.” Several pages of interesting notes about what’s needed in a new systems language, and the ways that BitC was too ambitious.
What ESR (equivalent series resistance) really means in the context of #capacitors. #hardware
An overview of #capacitors from a nitty-gritty hands-on perspective. #hardware
Eli Bendersky on the Expression Problem and how you can solve it in Clojure with multimethods, open methods, or protocols, or in other languages using the visitor pattern or multiple dispatch.
California reduced its use of coal-generated electricity to 0.2% in 2015 (not clear if this is 0.2% of electrical #energy or of total marketed energy). Natural gas has taken up the slack. Average retail price is 15.15¢/kWh.
The repo-man industry is using car-mounted #surveillance cameras ("LPR": license-plate reading) to mass-scan license plates in parking lots. Then they resell the information to insurers, banks, and law-enforcement agencies. MVTrac and DRN are two of the biggest LPR database companies; they also deploy cameras at buildings.
Embarrassing how bad the #performance of #big-data things like Elastic Map Reduce and #Hadoop can be when used on only a couple of gigabytes of data; the Configuration to Outperform a Single Thread is apparently a lot bigger than that because this guy got the answer from 1.75 gigabytes in 12 seconds on his laptop (in parallel, using xargs -P4) instead of the 26 minutes the Hadoop cluster needed. He gets slightly better performance using mawk instead of gawk.