April 2011
40 posts
pandagon.net - it's the eye of the panda, it's the... →
On the surface, the proposal is about male humility—-he’s supposed to get on one knee, offer a present that’s not reciprocated—-but in practice, it tends to be all about how much power men have over women in the world of romance and marriage. Which is why I cringe like a motherfucker when I see women swooning over “romantic” proposals, especially public ones...
“You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining...”
– cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog / There are two kinds of people in the world
this is my life and i love it.
(via reecepacheco)
For once, cdixon gives me the warm fuzzies. I may not know what I’m doing exactly, but I’m doing it. And I get smarter every day.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Oh look...
radicallyhottoff:
i don’t really care if recent graduates are moving back home. why the hell do we all think that it’s 1. sustainable and/or 2. *normal* for every single individual in the US to have their own house/apartment/etc? oh, NOES individualism is *dying* whatever shall we do????
will progressives/liberals regard this as an opportunity to create new types of living/accountability/etc?...
The dark side of Hadoop - BackType Technology →
Deploying a massively scalable recommender system... →
The purpose of this post is to explain how to use Apache Mahout to deploy a massively scalable, high throughput recommender system for a certain class of usecases.
I’ll describe the shape of usecases covered and give a step-by-step guide to setting up such a recommender system. Be aware that this is a guide intended for readers already familiar with Collaborative Filtering and recommender...
“You know, a guy coming out of addiction at thirty, thirty-five, because it often...”
– David Simon - The Straight Dope (via abbyjean)
Can I Just Watch A Game of Thrones in Peace?... →
For me, this normally comes up with new fantasy series. I am well aware of the dynamics of the fantasy world, and that most of the best authors generally create worlds in a certain mold: vaguely Middle Ages, super segregated European society archetypes and norms in play. The good are generally white and fair haired, the bad are at least dark haired, if not dark skinned. This is the major basis...
The Senate's War On Hardcore Porn →
Earlier this month, 42 Senators, including a handful of relatively liberal Democrats like Dianne Feinstein (who is about to hear from San Fernando Valley taxpayers) and Amy Klobuchar, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute more adult pornography. They were annoyed that the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, set up to pander to conservatives in the Bush administration, was shut down and...
Joycelyn Elders Puts Congress on Blast | The Root →
TR: As Congress moves on to debate over the 2012 budget, it’s very likely that Planned Parenthood will be on the chopping block again. Is this a mostly symbolic debate to get the Republican base revved up, with no chance of passing?
JE: Any woman who has a congressperson who votes against women’s reproductive rights is headed back to the Dark Ages, when they were owned by their...
The Truth About Race, Religion, And The Honor Code... →
While it’s impossible to know how many students disobey BYU’s honor code, which prohibits fornication and alcohol use, among other things, the honor code violations that come to light almost always involve student-athletes. And they almost always involve athletes of color. Since 1993, according to our research, at least 70 athletes have been suspended, dismissed, put on probation,...
The High Cost Of Easy Payments →
The first thing the scientists discovered is that exposing subjects to an object they wanted led to increased activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). That’s not particularly surprising: the NAcc is a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway, and is turned on by all sorts of expected pleasures. But then came the price tag. When the experimental subjects were shown the cost of the...
NewBlackMan: Scripting King James: The LeBrons and... →
Like Nike’s commercial, the 2011 web show is hyper commercial. Like its predecessor, it gives viewers a lot to think about in terms of black identity, commodified and otherwise. “The Nike series shows the LeBrons in a characteristically “black” behavior from signifying stories, or ‘baldheaded lies’ as they’re called, at the dinner table, to macking in the mirror, to dancing to Rick James’s...
Bolivia to ‘make world history’ by granting rights... →
dixiecupua:
Bolivia is preparing to pass a new law that could lead to citizens challenging environmental destruction in court. A Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (The Law of Mother Earth) would grant nature the same rights as humans, according to The Guardian.
“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make...”
– Chimamanda Adichie (via robot-heart-politics)
(or event or relationship or experience or etc)
“My problem with Javascript has always been that expertise is defined more in...”
– Someone on Hacker News
How Useful Is Personalized Search? [MIT Technology... →
2105:
Subhed: ”Research suggests that Google’s personalized results may not be much better than the ordinary kind.”
“People like me don’t say that the Ryan plan is too radical; we say that it’s a...”
– Paul Krugman (via ryking)
TechnoCalifornia: Recommender Systems: We're doing... →
Related to using ratings as data
Distance Measures: All the neighbor based methods in collaborative filtering are based on the use of some sort of distance measure. The most commonly used are Cosine distance and Pearson Correlation. However, both these distances assume a linear interval scale in their computations! We should conclude that using these distance measures with rating data is...
Startups And Work/Life Balance | Blog | myGengo →
Many things about our working culture smack of mysticism and witchcraft: the notion that an industry as diverse as startups shares the same time/competitive constraints, the idea that all job roles require approximately equivalent schedules (“every free hour”), the relative static-ness of schedules without regard to the product life-cycle, the “emergency”/”crunch” periods which seem to be...
“I mean, do a group of old white ladies govern what goes on with my balls? No....”
– Ned Hepburn of Death and Taxes magazine sums up the situation in Indiana, where all abortions past 22 weeks were banned last week.
You can see part of the state legislature’s chilling debate here, when a GOP rep says there can’t be an exception for rape or incest, because women might lie about...
Mongoid_fulltext: full-text n-gram search for your... →
It’s a fine component that splits sentences and uses MongoDB to index them. Unfortunately it doesn’t rank them, so results come in order of appearance. In contrast, mongoid-fulltext uses n-gram matching (with n=3 right now), so we index all of the substrings of length 3 from text that we want to search on. If you search for “damian hurst”, mongoid_fulltext does lookups for...
“…what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability from the...”
– Tetlock and Gardner, here is more. (via Marginal Revolution)
VCU Keeping Shaka Smart As Basketball Coach,... →
VCU athletic director Norwood Teague confirmed to Sporting News on Monday that Shaka Smart will remain the Rams’ basketball coach next season. Teague also acknowledged that Smart turned down the N.C. State head coaching vacancy in order to remain with VCU. According to the report, N.C. State offered the position to Smart last weekend, along with a salary in the range of $2 million per year.
...
A Comparison of SEC Coaches Salaries for 2011 -... →
The bounty from Auburn’s 2010 BCS National Championship certainly extended to the coaching staff. Offensive Coordinator Gus Malzahn’s new $1.3 million salary is more than three times what he made the year prior and more than enough to make him the highest-paid assistant in college football. Head Coach Gene Chizik, whose base salary was $2.1 million last year before bonuses from the...
The Communication Paradox | Monday Note →
2105:
Another paradox: The companies who best understand today’s communication needs are not the ten or twenty-years-old technology firms but rather old corporations with first-hand experience in the evolution of journalism. They might have been slow to understand, but now they got it. And with that hard-earned understanding comes efficiency and a bit cynicism.
Here are some key components of...
On the web server, scalability and speed are... →
If there is something cool about web programming is that often the web side is trivial to scale conceptually. Just add more web servers, there is no shared data. Your only bottleneck in a web app should be: the databases, the workers. There are no excuses for the page generation to be slow. In the web speed is scalability because every web server is conceptually a parallel computation unit.
...
“median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started...”
– ThinkProgress » In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27% While Worker Pay Went Up 2%
Apache Lucene 3.1.0 and Apache Solr 3.1.0 →
shalinmangar:
This is the first release bringing Lucene and Solr release versions in sync. There are numerous bug fixes, optimizations and new features. Download from here
Nice features:
On 64bit Windows and Solaris JVMs, MMapDirectory is now the
default implementation (returned by FSDirectory.open).
MMapDirectory also enables unmapping if the JVM supports it.
JSON document...
