Category: Uncategorized
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Dust-off
I’m returning to writing more, and more long-form. I love being witty and bantering short-form on Twitter as @trochee, and I don’t expect this to stop. I’m just putting a lot of work into this site over the next few weeks. [alternate subtitle: Dust-off and nuke the entire site from orbit; it’s the only way to be…
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Defended against criticism and immune to praise
Sometimes reading the comments can be illuminating to the psychology of coders. The comments on this wonderful post on assumptions about names are a case in point. Confronted with a long list of assumptions, about a third of the commenters angrily insist that THEIR particular (wrong) assumptions don’t matter in the “important cases” (e.g. “to…
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CDH3 on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin
I find myself typing the most absurd search strings (they read like lexical Tourette’s or XKCD passwords): pseudocluster ubuntu precise pangolin cloudera cdh3 I spent a while getting my new laptop set up with a Cloudera CDH3 Hadoop pseudo-distributed cluster. But I really wish I’d had the following instructions, simplified off the web with some help from…
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“Bank heist” collaboration pattern
Here’s my favorite collaboration pattern so far: the Bank Heist collaboration pattern. This pattern, which we know from The A-Team, Ocean’s 11 and Leverage, among others, shares many properties with an excellent developer team: You don’t have to like following orders to be on the team. Everybody’s a generalist, and an expert in one area (pickpocket, cat burglar, safe-cracker, grifter, etc)…
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Dolphins are nifty — but not magical
I saw this, and thought others would find it interesting too. … said one of the phoneticians at my alma mater. It’s a collection of rather fantastic claims about “dolphin language”, mixed with breathless praise for their affirming-the-consequent “Aqua Thought Foundation” (slogan might as well be “we already know dolphins are better than us”) and…
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order word constant information does have?
I’ve been reading — in my “copious free time”, as they say: Montemurro MA, Zanette DH, 2011 “Universal Entropy of Word Ordering Across Linguistic Families.” PLoS ONE 6(5): e19875. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019875 This article takes on some of the really nifty ideas of information theory, and asks one deceptively simple question: how much information does word order contribute to human language?…