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Kushal Dave shared an item on Google Reader

Jon Stewart Annihilates Sarah Palin's Media Surrogates | Comedy Central Insider - The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans

yesterday at 8:46 am - Link

Jeremy Hylton liked this

I don't watch regular TV news, but isn't this the sort of reporting they should be doing. - Jeremy Hylton

Brett Cannon shared an item on Google Reader

Red Light Cameras Don't Work

August 25 at 4:39 pm - Link

Jeremy Hylton liked this

The yellow lights are so short in Baltimore that I basically trained myself to stop at yellow lights, sometimes abruptly. It took a while to unlearn when I moved back to Pennsylvania. - Jeremy Hylton

j1m posted a link

The World’s Most Spectacular Roads

August 9 at 11:39 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Daniel Dulitz, Pierre, Michael Nielsen, sirish and 36 other people liked this

well, really spectacular photos of roads - j1m via Bookmarklet

very nice photos! - Hayk Hakobyan

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I can't believe they missed the Stelvio Pass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... or http://www.redlineblog.com/top... (esp http://www.redlineblog.com/aut...) - Nick Lothian

Nice - j1m

s/World/Mostly USA/ - Gregor J. Rothfuss

Argentina-Chile http://lh6.ggpht.com/_PAMdx6ul... - Alejandro S.

@Gregor, Really it's 2/3 spectacular roads from throughout the world, with 1/3 plain old rural us roads mixed in, except those all have spectacular skies. Yeah, I don't know what they're doing mixed in. - j1m

I recognize that stretch of Greenwich Township, Berks County. It's a great road for bicycling. - Jeremy Hylton

Matt Cutts posted an entry on Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

What to do in Los Angeles?

August 8 at 1:08 pm - Link

Get stuck in traffic? - Heidi Moon

Be fake? I dunno. Get a boob job? - Jim Kukral via twhirl

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Must eat at katana on sunset. - Marco (aureliusmaximus)

you gotta blade by the beach.. and maybe get someone to film you passing them hot girls in bikinis we always see on tv :) - Roger R

btw that'd be the boob job girls - Roger R

leave! - Chuq Von Rospach

Dearly Departed Tour - Jeremy Hylton

Farmer's market - Riona MacNamara

The road out of town. - John Honeck

Go to The Kings Head Pub on Santa Monica Blvd. - Ian May

weird ice cream! http://www.yelp.com/biz/scoops... - Benjamin Lee

Wow, people are really harsh on L.A. We'll see if I agree at the end of the week. :) - Matt Cutts

Griffith Park, Pink's Hot Dogs http://www.pinkshollywood.com/ , Mulholland Drive and Hollywood Hills murder spots - Jean Harlow's old house and Sharon Tate's - there's a Jay Sebring connection there (ok that last suggestion is weird but something I enjoyed doing). - Laura Norvig

Python: Yu-Jie Lin posted a link

Nested generator caveat - comp.lang.python | Google Groups

July 8 at 9:46 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Nice explanation by Mark Wooding. This behavior continues to surprise people, but I think he hits the nail on the head when he comments that a 'let' would be helpful. - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton shared an item on Google Reader

Coffee Labs Roasters, Tarrytown NY

July 30 at 8:41 am - Link

I stopped at coffee labs this weekend, too. I agree. It's terrific. - Jeremy Hylton

Kushal Dave posted a message on Twitter

“I will smack the next person who says "mute point" where they mean "moot point" and where they probably don't even mean moot.”

July 25 at 10:16 am - Link

Take them to the moot court! - Jeremy Hylton

Will you be smacking for "hone in", too? - j1m

Jeremy Hylton shared an item on Google Reader

Portable Air Conditioners

July 8 at 1:47 pm - Link

Has anyone tried one of these portable air conditioners? I like the idea of having an AC that I use only occasionally and doesn't block an entire window. - Jeremy Hylton

Bret Taylor shared an item on Google Reader

Done, and Gets Things Smart

June 17 at 1:12 am - Link

Tavi, Vinay | विनय, Michelle Lee, Rich Bragg and 46 other people liked this

Looooong, but great read. I often felt at Google, on the sales side of things, we were so smart that we were stupid. I can't tell you how many meetings I sat through where simple solutions (and, probably, the right solutions!) were ignored because they sounded too simple. And we'd spend a full hour coming up with complicated, convoluted, confusing solutions because that's what smart people do, right? Come up with arcane stuff? Agh. It was all gas. Not throwing anyone under the bus -- I was as guilty as anyone else. - Ginger Makela

100-word version: "You're not as smart as you think you are. You need to find people way smarter and more effective than you. You can't find them with normal interviews. A six-month trial period might work, but what super smart person will stand for that? Your only real hope is that you've bumped into them some time in the past, or maybe you can find them by asking around. Good luck, and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help." - ⓞnor

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Ginger, thanks for sharing your experience at Google. - Mike Reynolds

First page down, giving a Like for that. Continuing to read... - Hutch Carpenter

Really great read, and a true take on the types of "smart" out there. Also, I liked this little add-on Steve had in the comments section: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level. " Interesting thought. - Hutch Carpenter

The core of any good engineering culture is deeply allergic to unnecessary complexity. "Fancy" is a bad word; "complicated" is a really, really bad word. Design doc templates have a section asking you to explain why a simpler solution would work. Half my interviewers (having convinced themselves that I could code) were making sure that I wasn't the type to build giant rickety abominations. But a company like Google is too big for any single generalization to apply. - ⓞnor

ⓞnor: "and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help" Ha! :) - Bret Taylor

@nor if you do that for every Steve Yegge post you might have a high-traffic blog on your hands - Jeremy Raines

ⓞnor-notes.blogspot.com - Ginger Makela

@Ginger: I see that everywhere, not only in Sales… :( - Amit Patel

very cool...that is probably why friendfeed is ramping so smoothly and getting intelligent new features vs. another nameless service that is having severe growing pains. - Pokai

That's excellent hiring criteria -- would you hire them for your start-up. I know from experience that you can't really understand how important it is to work with A-players until you work at a company with mainly B-players. - Todd Nemet

I really prefer to work with @-players and ideally ?-players - ⓞnor

What about cos-players? - Jim Norris

And who is super-heroic dude? - Jim Norris

cos-players tend to be irrational unless you get exactly the right angle. - ⓞnor

Question: Why would one of these super-heroic programmers want to work for you rather than launching their own thing? - Adewale Oshineye

Dan should publish a blog with 100-word versions of all of Stevey's posts. I don't have the patience for the long versions. - Jeremy Hylton

I want high quality generic collaborative summarization in general. Not sure how it would work, it's really easy to warp and distort things when boiling them down, and way too easy to take cheap shots at the author (as I did above). - ⓞnor

Is that a bad thing? - j1m

ⓞnor, use a wiki. Also, i know an infinite number of rational cos-players. Take 60º for example. - John Lam

Jeremy Hylton shared an item on Google Reader

The 0 - 4096 Supreme Court Ruling | ebogjonson.com

June 12 at 8:49 pm - Link

Paul Haahr and j1m liked this

"more Americans have been killed by Scalia's vote to give the 2000 election to Bush than will EVER be killed by today's decision that trials of enemy combatants must adhere and conform to the US Constitution." - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton posted a link

PLT Scheme Blog

June 13 at 5:57 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

"Improvements to the PLT Scheme language include better syntax for modules, better support for optional and keyword function arguments, more expressive syntax for structure types, streamlined hash-table operations, new syntax for list comprehensions and iterations, a more complete and consistent set of list and string operations, and reduced dependence on mutable pairs." - Jeremy Hylton

David Bailey added a product to the Amazon Wish List History and Science

Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region (California Natural History Guides)

June 8 at 5:30 am - Link

Have you read Assembling California? http://www.johnmcphee.com/asse... - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton posted a link

What are you lookin' at?: 'Battlestar Galactica': Let's get back to base-ics

June 5 at 1:06 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"I think the 'Galactica' writers like Romo a lot more than the guy deserves, as he's less a character than a collection of colorful tics." - Jeremy Hylton

agreed. the last episode was not up to par :( - Neha Narula

Jeremy Hylton shared an item on Google Reader

Remote Agent

June 1 at 6:55 am - Link

On May 17, 1999, the Remote Agent took control of Deep Space 1 to start the first of two on-board autonomy experiments. Being in mission control during these experiments was one of the most thrilling moments of my professional life! - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton shared an item on Google Reader

Bad Astronomy Blog » Birth cry of a supernova

May 21 at 6:29 pm - Link

For the first time in history, astronomers have unambiguously observed the exact moment when a star explodes. - Jeremy Hylton

Amit Patel bookmarked a page on delicious

You Can't Soak the Rich - WSJ.com

May 20 at 1:08 pm - Link

“No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.” - Amit Patel

http://www.portfolio.com/views... - Jeremy Hylton

Another interesting graph: http://www.visualizingeconomic... - Jim Norris

As I said in response to Paul's posting of this: it's purely lying with statistics. The top income tax rate may have gone down, but revenues are flat only because other taxes stayed the same or went up. - Alex Power

Brian White posted a message on Twitter

“Was looking at speakeasy.net for DSL, but Best Buy owns them?!”

May 2 at 12:02 pm - Link

Best Buy owns them, but I found their technical support to be superb despite this. My only caveat is that they told me my line was close enough to the junction box to get the full 6Mbps down, but it was much further than they thought so I had to cancel service (within my free 25 day trial). Otherwise I'd still be with them and happy. They were very helpful in diagnosing the issue. - Kevin Fox

I've been using Speakeasy for about eight years. The tech support has been superb in the past. I haven't had any need of its since Best Buy bought them, but it can't be bad that I haven't needed it. I'd go for it. - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton posted a link

AP Computer Science is NOT Going Away

April 7 at 7:56 am - Link

Given what the language tests and my own experience taking the class (years ago), maybe it should go away. - Jeremy Hylton

Why do you say that? - ⓞnor

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I learned a lot about the syntax and rules of Pascal when I took the class and next to nothing about concepts. In the C++ days, lots of teachers worried about whether students would be able to compile their code at all. Java doesn't seem like an improvement as a teaching language. - Jeremy Hylton

I already knew Pascal, but I learned a bunch of the classical CS stuff about algorithms and data structures: binary trees, sorting, that kind of thing. Looks like that's because I took AB (which is what they're cutting!) rather than A: http://www.collegeboard.com/st.... I feel like the class changed me from being a BASIC programmer who knew Pascal to being a Pascal programmer. - ⓞnor

Java doesn't seem like an improvement as a teaching language? Why not? - ƃuɐʞ

Why would it be? I mean, it's obviously good to use a real-world language, but from a strictly pedagogical point of view I don't see why Java would be better than Pascal. If anything, the OO stuff seems like a confusing distraction: to write "hello world" you have to explain about "class" and "public static", or just leave those words as magic boilerplate to be explained later. - ⓞnor

yeah, i think it's always better to not teach in languages that aren't really in common use -- cut out the middle man - j1m

Java is better than Pascal because real world people actually use Java. the majority of CS high school students are not going to go on to become hardcore software engineers.... - ƃuɐʞ

java is awfully verbose but pascal isn't that much better. languages with interactive loops seem like a nice thing for newcomers to experiment (and pascal, c, java all lack that). - Larry Greenfield

Why not just use python to teach? Is there some requirement to know about strong typing when you first learn to program? - Chris White

I think it might be fun to teach CS with Javascript. I feel like everything else is a million miles away from anything relevant or useful, but writing little Javascript toys that do simple things on web pages seems like it's something students could direct relate to. You could teach linked lists there as well as anywhere (though I have no idea why you would teach linked lists at all). - ⓞnor

brian kernighan uses javascript as a first language for his CS-for-non-majors course at princeton. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/co... - Larry Greenfield

Cool. I wonder if people like it. - ⓞnor

MIT is using Python for its intro class http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6... - Jeremy Hylton

Either javascript or Python seems like a better place to start than a language like java with so many rules and so much syntax. - Jeremy Hylton

Brett Cannon shared an item on Google Reader

The Ineffectiveness of Security Cameras

April 7 at 3:44 pm - Link

Reminds me of http://www.newyorker.com/repor... - Jeremy Hylton

Larry Greenfield posted a link

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times

March 29 at 6:17 am - Link

Howard Trickey liked this

I'm not interested until it produces fire-breathing dragons - j1m

"Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory..." - ⓞnor

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yeah, nice. but note that the other plaintiff appears to be an actual former physics grad student. - j1m

So, wdyt? - ⓞnor

If the fact that seemingly intelligent people worry about whether people believe that the universe was created by "an unseen omnipotent entity" or "a big bang" is a joke, then the fact that $8 billion has been spent on this is the punchline. - Alex Mendes da Costa

m13a, are you saying that you think the questions the Large Hadron Collider are essentially religious ones? I tend to see cosmology that way, but I thought I was the only one. - j1m

@ⓞnor: I think who knows. Like 99.99% of people, I don't know the physics literative myself. All I can do is pay attention to the opinions of experts. If neither of these guys knows much physics, I'd certainly ignore it. Of course, if there's a real risk, even 1 would be a surprisingly small number of naysayers, because scientists are all about saying nay. Adding another layer, the Times account surely does no more than scratch the surface of how serious phsyicists think about this question. - j1m

I ran into a friend with a BS in Physics, and he said this scenario, though not impossible, is viewed as very unlikely. I said, You mean like one chance in 10^-21? He said, Maybe more like 10^-9, but really unlikely. - j1m

There were similar comments about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider several years ago. The Tech had a nice interview with Bob Jaffe, where he discussed some of the physics in that case, http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N.... His comment on the black hole there was: "The energy required to make a black hole out of two nuclei would be about 115 orders of magnitude larger than what will be available at RHIC." - Jeremy Hylton

Brett Cannon added a product to the Amazon Wish List Stuff I Want

Battlestar Galactica - Season Three

April 3 at 6:56 am - Link

Just buy it! I was desperate enough to buy the Region 2 DVDs last fall. - Jeremy Hylton

Paul Buchheit posted a link

23.2 doctest -- Test interactive Python examples

March 7 at 12:44 pm - Link

Jon McAlister and Ros liked this

"The doctest module searches for pieces of text that look like interactive Python sessions, and then executes those sessions to verify that they work exactly as shown." - Paul Buchheit

That is really cool, can't replace a complete unit test suite but it must be great for small projects - Benjamin Golub

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Doctest is great. I think unit test suites are overrated. - ⓞnor

I find that I look forward to writing doctest tests, and I dread writing regular unit tests. Doctest also gets me into the “write tests first” mood. - Amit Patel

We used doctest for some pretty substantial test suites at Zope. I thought it worked really well because it was so easy to add text explaining what the test was supposed to do. - Jeremy Hylton

Awesome, I'm going to give this a shot now. - Jon McAlister

Doctest is great also because it's so *close* to the code. No scrolling, instant enlightenment :) - 9000

Jeff Reynar favorited a video on YouTube

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

February 26 at 8:08 pm - Link

Angela is branching out in her video tastes. - Jeremy Hylton

dave burke published a photo on Flickr

Dissertation break

February 21 at 5:37 am - Link

Good luck, Kim! - Jeremy Hylton

Kushal Dave shared an item on Google Reader

Zojirushi Rizo rice cooker plans western invasion

February 15 at 9:40 am - Link

I have a regular Zojirushi, not risotto setting, but does great with everything else. - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton posted an entry on Jeremy Hylton: Inconceivable

Dave Weissman needs a haircut

January 24 at 12:50 pm - Link

Benjamin Lee liked this

Note this is the first result for the query: weissman haircut - Jeremy Hylton

Mihai Parparita posted a message on Twitter

“Nothing like running a Python program for 30 seconds only to find out you have a typo on the last line. (type checking)++”

January 21 at 2:08 pm - Link

MJiA and Frederick Akalin liked this

30 whole seconds! you do realize that builds in the wonderful world of type-checked software I live in often take upwards of 30 minutes? - ⓞnor

Would a lint tool have caught it or not? - Jeremy Hylton

Most likely, but I haven't gotten into the habit of running one. - Mihai Parparita

dave burke published a photo on Flickr

It's snowing

January 17 at 12:21 pm - Link

I recognize that building! - Jeremy Hylton

Jeremy Hylton posted a link

Python's Super Considered Harmful

January 17 at 11:22 am - Link

ƃuɐʞ and Jim Norris liked this

Can't we just not use subclasses, or does Python idiomatic style require them? - ⓞnor

Oh, subclasses are useful occasionally. I think the problem with super and with the MRO is that by the time you need to use the, you have code that is too complicated to understand. - Jeremy Hylton

Bret Taylor bookmarked a page on delicious

Parsing - Python parser generator module

January 13 at 1:04 pm - Link

Haven't used it yet, but there are surprisingly few parsing modules available for Python, so giving it a try. - Bret Taylor

I think parser generators are kind of on the outs, anyway. - ⓞnor

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"Regexps" in Perl 6 will do everything! I haven't worked on my parser generator since 2003 or so. Why parse when you have JSON and XML? - Amit Patel

I think pyparsing is a better choice - number5

Seems like it depends on what you are trying to parse. I sometimes fantasize about writing a new python-like language without colons and underscores, with implied self, and a switch statement. This would be great for that I think. - Chris White

I use Python because of the libraries and community. Colons, underscores, self, etc. are all very minor in my decision. - Amit Patel

IMO, the cool thing here is GLR support which allows you to write complex grammars in a more "natural" way. Specifically ambiguity resolution is explicit and clear, not buried amidst a bunch of transformational gymnastics that only someone who studied compilers in the 70's could love. :-) This is the first Python parser toolkit with GLR support as far as I'm aware. - Kevin Scott

SPARK has had GLR support since the last 1990s. See http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/.... As I recall, some people had surprising performance problems. - Jeremy Hylton