Interesting:
PHP’s foreach is a very neat and to-the-point language construct. Still some people don’t like to use it, because they think it is slow. One reason usually named is that foreach copies the array it iterates. Thus some people recommend to write:
This is a surprising story, wherein Amazon seems to casually break its contract to demand more money from a company that sells through Amazon:
M-Edge’s success and recognition by Amazon should have been news to celebrate, but a lawsuit filed by M-Edge paints a very different picture. Here’s the background information summarized from the lawsuit:
October 2008: M-Edge start selling Kindle jacket paying Amazon’s standard 8% commission
February 2009: M-Edge enter “Kindle Compatible” agreement with Amazon taking their commission payment to 15% ...
Read More Source
Interesting:
While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. ...
Read More Source
If Facebook is full of such smart people, why is so little care shown for a clean API?
I could pick from hundreds of examples from the last few years, but here’s why Facebook wasted a couple hours of my valuable time today:
The Javascript SDK lets you subscribe to events ‘auth.login’ and ‘auth.logout’. They are documented like so:
auth.login – fired when the user logs in auth.logout – fired when the user logs out Pretty simple, right? Of course it isn’t. In fact, ...
Read More Source
A very nice summary of Galois Theory, which I have read about before but which I still don’t understand. But, you know, every time I read about it, I feel like I come closer to understanding it.
For a long time, people wondered whether it is possible to write down something like the “quadratic formula” for cubic, quartic and quintic polynomials with integer coefficients. We now know that for cubic and quartic polynomials, this is possible. But for degree 5 ...
Read More Source
During recessions, companies sometimes fire too many people, losing the institutional memory that glues the organization together:
I’ve seen memory drains during down-turns in the economy. The company will offer the oldest, most-experienced, highest paid employees a buy-out or they’ll offer them five years extra pension/retirement if they leave now. Mgt figures that consultants can be hired if they ever need X, Y or Z done again at a fraction of the cost of the employees.
Many senior employees accept the offers, ...
Read More Source
Worrisome that a member of the EU can slide back into authoritarianism.
That’s not all. The long arm of the current Fidesz government can grab and shake any foreseeable future government through the officials they are now putting into place. The new constitutional order extends the terms of office for the public prosecutor (9 years), the head of the state audit office (12 years), the head of the national judicial office (9 years), the head of the media board (9 ...
Read More Source
PHP memory management is weak compared to something like the JVM. Perhaps that is because PHP scripts usually execute in a few seconds and then stop, whereas JVM software often has to maintain 99.99% uptime?
In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage:
I am so very American, when I first heard of this, I assumed this was management attacking the rights of the workers, rather than the workers winning something they had specifically fought for.
The backlash against twenty-four-hour connectivity has started.
Carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) has agreed to deactivate e-mails on German staff Blackberry devices out of office hours to give them a break.
Under an agreement with labour representatives, staff at Europe’s biggest automaker will receive e-mails via Blackberry from half an hour ...
Read More Source
Frustrating that there are people anywhere who argue about the obvious stimulus that comes from a weak dollar. If a strong currency leads to a strong economy, then why did China just spend $5 trillion dollars to keep its currency weak?
Matthew Yglesias finds John Cochrane ridiculing the notion that devaluation makes it easier to bring a country’s relative wages down, whereas the empirical evidence is overwhelming that devaluation does, in fact, do just that.
Now, Yglesias has some fun with ...
Read More Source
I am doubtful of this argument. Is ambition more difficult as you get older? It seems to me when you are younger you are looking for love, when you are older you are worried about children, so there is always something that might act as a break on ambition. But real ambition means putting all of that aside, and focusing on a single goal. This is difficult at any point in life.
I’m in my 40s and I’ve spent quite ...
Read More Source
Poland has immense deposits of shale gas.
With shale deposits distributed generously worldwide, Europe is beginning to catch the trailing edge of this game-changing moment in global energy production. Today the European Union is engaged in a crucial debate over whether and how to tap into its own shale deposits, which contain more than 17.5 trillion cubic meters (and with the recent discovery of a new major deposit in the United Kingdom, possibly as much as 22 trillion).
In Europe, Poland ...
Read More Source
Interesting:
There’s never been a better time to be a developer. Thanks to an unprecedented range of open-source software, learning resources and useful web services at our disposal, we can learn new languages, get help, collaborate with others and, if our ideas win traction, there’s now a multitude of investors waiting in the wings to help us build companies around our products.
This is not to say that our work is easy. Standards must remain high. But the resources available offer us ...
Read More Source
My 5th grade teacher called me “an enigma”. This fits with my own experience as a student:
From Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?, a good review paper. What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know ...
Read More Source
Laura Klein wisely points out that Penelope Trunk is a moron who needs to shut the fuck up:
Similarly, long before women had the right to vote in the US, many women didn’t actually want the right to vote. Some even felt that women were biologically not capable of voting well. And for years after they had the right to vote, many people still felt that it was the wrong decision.
How many women in the US do you know who ...
Read More Source
Do you belong? Subtle cues including how a room looks could tell people they do not belong. This may have a big impact on questions such as why there are so few women in tech.
Meanwhile, other psychologists wondered how much you can tell about someone from the stuff in their bedrooms. Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin gave students permission to enter the dorm rooms or apartments of other students and asked them to rate ...
Read More Source
When I really want to share something with a friend, I send them an email. The remarkable thing about a lot of “social” sites is how anti-social they are. It’s sort of like the problem with dating sites. With dating sites, there is no way to limit the trolls. With social sites, there is no way to limit the sharing enough to communicate “this is important”.
The other day, I read a perceptive article, “In Defense of Friction,” arguing that ...
Read More Source
Why let others judge you? Why not define yourself?
Another anti-college screed. I agree with all of it:
We may have been fooled by one of our generation’s biggest scams. In fact, not only do we blindly accept it, but most of us will be working our way out of debt for a decade because of it. It’s a system that penalizes creativity, scatters our focus thinly between unrelated errands and unashamedly conditions us to believe that a few people can ...
Read More Source
Interesting if true:
Our process, despite the pay gap, is identical for men and women. We start with phone interviews, and move into a personal and technical interview. Once a candidate passes both of those, we start salary negotiations. This is where the women seem to come in last.
The reason they don’t keep up, from where I sit, is simple. Often, a woman will enter the salary negotiation phase and I’ll tell them a number will be sent to them in ...
Read More Source
In some ways, this sounds like an insightful write up, comparing the ability to add numbers in Lush versus Clojure:
I have avoided the JVM my entire life. I am presently confronted with problems which fit in the JVM; JVM libraries, concurrency, giant data: all that good stuff. Rather than doing something insane like learning Java, I figured I’d learn me some Clojure. Why not? It’s got everything I need: JVM guts, lispy goodness; what is not to love?
Well, as it ...
Read More Source
What’s interesting to me is how powerful the forces are to ensure that the new people who get hired are similar to the people who are already there. The possibility of large cultural differences or shocking differences of opinion are therefore reduced to negligible.
1. Most applications practically go straight in the trash.
Because professionals balanced recruitment responsibilities with full-time client work, they often screened resumes while commuting to and from the office and client sites; in trains, planes, ...
Read More Source
Very interesting:
The key is the pregnancy. For a 16 year-old girl regular unprotected sex will result in a full term pregnancy in the modern world with roughly probability one. There is little chance she will die in child birth. Late term miscarriages at her age are rare.
Now, just like any other parent the birth of that child will be the most important event in her life. And, the love of that child will be the most valuable thing she ...
Read More Source
Grit is more important that IQ or self control.
Why might most people think that IQ and self-control are more important than consistent, long term effort? There are many possible answers, but Duckworth’s research suggests an explanation I hadn’t thought of before: that it’s harder to observe long term focused efforts by others.
We speculate that individual differences in the intensity dimension of effort are salient and, therefore, described by many adjectives in the English language (e.g., energetic, conscientious, dutiful, ...
Read More Source
It is strange that Lego will no longer run ads like this:
We ended up getting the Lego Star Wars calendar instead, which is awesome except that it’s not particularly Christmassy (though you do get a Yoda dressed as Santa at the end (that’s in continuity, right?)) and it cost an unbelievable $40 because of the licensing fees (it’s like $10 more than the normal calendar).
This is par for the course in old Legoland now. Outside of the Movie tie-ins ...
Read More Source
My name is Lawrence Krubner. I run WP Questions .
May 7, 2012 2:58 pm
"How long have you lived here? http://oneetynyk.de.tl blowjob loli they arent really married you can tell beca..."
May 5, 2012 3:31 pm
"How much were you paid in your last job? http://amuubouh.de.tl petit girl bbs Vintage Lela Star. Still don't ..."
January 10, 2012 1:09 pm
"Thank you, Charlotte. But what is the main advantage of Kachingle for you? You could perhaps find a more direc..."
May 17, 2012 2:06 am
From free cell phone ringtones on MySql Workbench is a total waste of time
"I like it so much, http://dailybooth.com/freecellphoneringto free cell phone ringtones, jsneke,..."