Siddhartha Reddy

We're making language learning more efficient and fun. - Siddhartha Reddy

The first supervised learning method we introduce is the multinomial Naive Bayes or multinomial NB model, a probabilistic learning method. - Siddhartha Reddy

Txr is an interpreter for a query language (the ``txr language''). A txr query matches text and extracts pieces by binding them to variables that are embedded in the query. Txr can output the raw bindings gathered from the data, or substitute them into a template-driven report. - Siddhartha Reddy

How do you fight feature creep in software? Here's an idea: do not put each new feature request or idea on a to-do list. Instead, put them on an (un)features list. An (un)features list is a list of features you've consciously decided not to implement. It's a well maintained list of things that might seem cool, but would detract from the core product. You thought about implementing each one, but after careful consideration decided it should be an (un)feature and not a feature. - Siddhartha Reddy

It is common to argue that intellectual property (IP) in the form of copyrights and patents is crucial for the creation of innovative ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, software, books, and music. Proponents argue that IP is just like ordinary property in houses and cars. In fact, empirical evidence shows that IP does not promote innovation and that, unlike ordinary property, it is detrimental to the social good. - Siddhartha Reddy

This agreement is entered into this ___ day of ___ 20__ by and between _____________ (hereinafter "The Advisor") and _____________ (hereinafter "The Keeper of the Idea" or "I") regarding information The Keeper of The Idea is choosing to share with The Advisor (hereinafter "The Idea"). WHEREAS I possess a bright idea that I am choosing to disclose to you, The Advisor, with the mutual understanding that you are my friend and that you will not screw me. - Siddhartha Reddy

Hello proggit, I've heard from quite a few places lately to prefer composition to inheritance (last time was from http://www.engineyard.com/blog...) when making an object-oriented design. Can anyone explain to me the reason behind this position? The first example of practically any object-oriented programming tutorial is making a super class and a subclass. Why is this considered a bad (or at least, less good) practice? - Siddhartha Reddy

Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website. - Siddhartha Reddy

Calluna is my first attempt to make a (serious) text typeface and it is the fruit of 1.5 years of work. Be sure to read more about it in the carefully designed Calluna PDF specimen (272 KB). Calluna comes in 8 styles: 5 weights and 3 italics. Calluna is spaced and kerned with Igino Marini's iKern service. - Siddhartha Reddy

In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability. - Siddhartha Reddy

Riak is a document-oriented database. Riak is a decentralized key-value store, with the standard get, put, and delete operations. Riak is a distributed, fault-tolerant storage solution. Riak is open source and NoSQL. Riak uses HTTP, JSON, REST. Riak is scalable. - Siddhartha Reddy

At the PODC conference in 2000, Eric Brewer gave a talk on Robust Distributed Systems. As part of a general attempt to clean up approaches to real-world distributed systems problems, he proposed the "CAP Theorem": that of the three desired properties of Consistency, Availability, and Partition-tolerance, you could only count on having any two of them in any shared-data system. - Siddhartha Reddy

This article represents my notes and research to date on distributed key-value stores (and some other stuff) that might be suitable as RDBMS replacements under the right conditions. - Siddhartha Reddy

I cannot possibly list how many of my friends are perpetually stressed out about meeting deadlines within their startups. I have taken to asking them, "is that like food, or is it like laundry?" It matters, a lot. While deadlines, focus and momentum are of paramount importance in any business, they are often arbitrary, fuzzy and come with a cost. It is of vital importance that we learn, as "business parents" to tell the difference between an arbitrary deadline, a fuzzy deadline and a real deadline - and to be able to assess the cost and benefit of meeting the deadlines we set. - Siddhartha Reddy

Remus provides transparent, comprehensive high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor. It does this by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. Key features: * The backup VM is an exact copy of the primary VM. When failure happens, it continues running on the backup host as if failure had never occurred. * The backup is completely up-to-date. Even active TCP sessions are maintained without interruption. * Protection is transparent. Existing guests can be protected without modifying them in any way. - Siddhartha Reddy

Numbers? Add 'em up! - Siddhartha Reddy

Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as “NoSQL databases.” - Siddhartha Reddy

Resque is our Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later. Background jobs can be any Ruby class or module that responds to perform. Your existing classes can easily be converted to background jobs or you can create new classes specifically to do work. Or, you can do both. - Siddhartha Reddy

Rich Hickey’ presentation is organized around a number of programming concepts: identity, state and values. He explains how to represent composite objects as values and how to deal with change and state, as it is implemented in Clojure. - Siddhartha Reddy

API design is one of the more important skills possessed by web developers today. The reason behind this fact is that web applications are increasingly unable to live in isolation while at the same time providing the scope of features and web awareness users have come to expect. Developing for the web means, to a greater or lesser degree, being a productive citizen in a kingdom of online data exchange; and whether by formal engineering or organic growth, this means building an API. But API design isn’t limited to pursuing the affable integration promises of the open web. Understanding the power of an API in relation to application design is just as valuable to business needs as sharing data across services is to user desires. The power, in fact, stems from the same source as every other factor in systems design: managing complexity. - Siddhartha Reddy

Summary. This article presents results from a study investigating the personality of typefaces. Participants were asked to rate 40 typefaces (from serif, sans serif, display, and handwriting classes) using semantic differential scales. Responses are shown by typeface class and individual typeface using scaled scores. These results are helpful to practitioners when deciding which typeface to use for online text. - Siddhartha Reddy

Enter commands at the prompt and hit CTRL+ENTER to evaluate. Hit CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN to navigate your language-specific history. Hit CTRL+SPACE to switch languages or use the metacommand '/switch', for example '/switch clojure' to start coding in clojure. Supported languages include: * beanshell * * clojure * groovy * * javascript * * python * * ruby * * scala * * scheme - Siddhartha Reddy

Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort Ad Verbum is a wordplay-based game. - Siddhartha Reddy