It's often desirable to build wrappers around existing objects, implementing the same interface. As an example one can wrap a java.sql.Connection object with a wrapper that measures timing data (how long the underlying java.sql.Connection spent in blocking calls). In fact, it's often useful to build a …
Sorry to break into a non-programming rant. No python today.
Over the past week or so, there has been a small war within journalism. Charlotte Laws, a reporter, discovered that another reporter was writing about her daughter. Specifically this reporter (Hunter Moore) discovered, via dubious sources, compromising information about her …
more ...The hidden dangers of noninformative priors.
Ben Walsh discusses the SEC's new program to allow subpenny trading.
A neat new recommendation algorithm.
How Twitter improved JVM performance by reducing garbage collection. I've been forced to do similar things, mainly by Hadoop.
Jim Manzi discusses problems with the negative income tax …
more ...As the owner of the spamblog http://www.iwishiwastaller.com, I've run into the following problem. I'm selling some height enhancing pills full of organic free range snake oil. I've come up with several different calls to action:
Eric Liu shows why there is a single correct bid price you should use for a given google adword. The world is made of math, so don't hesitate to use it.
This excellent reddit comment explains the real difference between monotheism and polytheism, and it's not what you think.
Some …
more ...In a blog post yesterday, I advocated very strongly that rather than simply bloviating about political (and other) topics, we should instead build mathematical models to clearly express our thinking. There was a lot of disagreement on this. But quite a few people took the point to heart, and several …
more ...Basic Income is a popular policy floating around the internet lately. The idea consists of declaring that the government will pay each living adult a fixed amount of money every month - an amount comparable to a minimum wage job. This policy would then replace all current welfare programs - welfare, unemployment …
more ..."There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
Phil Karlton
For those of using Postgres as a data store, cache invalidation has become significantly easier. Postgres has introduced the command NOTIFY which can be used to inform the cache of necessary invalidation.
Consider the following problem. I have an extremely large number of servers, each of which uploads their logs to a Hadoop cluster. Each line of the log file contains a server IP address, and represents a single message in Hadoop. I'm investigating a network intrusion. One of my network admins …
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"So, how much experience do you have with Big Data and Hadoop?" they asked me. I told them that I use Hadoop all the time, but rarely for jobs larger than a few TB. I'm basically a big data neophite - I know the concepts, I've written code, but never at …
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