"And what of these lists? They’re long, you never get to the end of them, and half the time the tasks on the list never get done. While it feels good to check items off the list, it feels horrible having items that never get checked off. This is all useless spending of mental energy, because none of it gets you anywhere.
The only thing that matters is the actual doing."

"Lower Uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers and lawyers. At companies they're mostly people above the rank of vice president and below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even part-time Post columnists who earn their livings as consultants). They include government officials — and, yes, SEC lawyers — who didn't make or inherit fortunes before entering public service. Lower Uppers are professionals who by dint of education, hard work and good luck are living better than 99 percent of anyone who has ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many people with credentials much like their own seem to be living in the kind of Gatsby-like splendor they'll never enjoy."

"The main attraction (and last presentation) was from my friend Gary Bernhardt1. Gary spent a few months contracting on a Rails project for four hours in the morning and a Django project for four hours in the afternoon. So when he speaks of either, it’s not in ignorance.

At the end, I couldn’t find a single criticism of Ruby that I disagreed with. I did pick up a new appreciation for unique features of the Ruby language that I previously took for granted."

"Staged self-assembly with RNA removal is a model of tile-based algorithmic self-assembly that was introduced by Abel, Benbernou, Damian, Demaine, Demaine, Flatland, Kominers and Schweller (Shape Replication through Self-Assembly and RNase Enzymes, SODA 2010) and is a model that allows for the periodic removal of all tiles in a given assembly that belong to a specially designated group of (RNA) tiles. In this paper, we study the self-assembly of arbitrary shapes in staged assembly systems with RNA removal. We analyze the performance of our assembly systems with respect to their tile complexity, stage complexity as well as the scale factor, connectivity and addressability of the uniquely produced final assembly."

"For me, being a part of the Ruby community feels like getting a sneak peek at where software development is going six months to two years from now. That’s not to say it’s all rainbows and daisies…the constantly changing landscape requires a real passionate dedication to keep up or you’ll quickly fall behind, and not all technologies are meant to immediately be deployed to massive-scale production environments (restraint is a skill a good Rubyist must learn and exercise on a regular basis). But I love Ruby because I feel confident that I will be made aware of trends in software development long before I would otherwise be expected to understand them."

"This strongly suggests that conservatives face epistemic closure, at least on this issue. The more conservatives ‘know,’ the more likely they are to be wrong."

"Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems. On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster."

"Siemens's plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system's generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine's blades and must therefore be much bigger–over four meters in diameter for Siemens's three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine's entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons–12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines."

"Computational complexity has in the past adapted well to new computation models from the PRAM to biological and quantum computers. But we are seeing new computing paradigms in multicore and cloud computing and theory seems late to the party. There was a nice SODA paper on MapReduce, the basic cloud computing operation, but for the most part theorists haven't tackled the cloud computing model and only a few have looked at multicore. Theory can say much about new computational methods, both in how we can take advantage of them and what they can't do, but only if we make the effort to develop the proper models to capture these new approaches."

"What is striking is that caveat emptor arises as a legal principle mainly because of the tangle the courts would get into if they tried to enforce a more ambitious standard of right and wrong.
Chief Justice Marshall’s logic surely applies with even greater force to modern deals between investment banks and sophisticated qualified investors, both of which will be simultaneously working on many deals, each involving sensitive proprietary information."

"BayesMotel is a multi-variate Bayesian classification engine. There are two steps to Bayesian classification:

Training You provide a set of variables along with the proper classification for that set.
Runtime You provide a set of variables and ask for the proper classification according to the training in Step 1.
Commonly this is used for spam detection. You will provide a corpus of emails or other data along with a "Spam/NotSpam" classification. The library will determine which variables affect the classification and use that to judge future data."

"Through most of the century, brackets were much closer to a continuous scale. There was a big shift in thought though in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The brackets became much more distinct. The idea has more or less stuck over the past two decades."

"Node.js is evented I/O for JavaScript, built on top of the blazingly fast V8 engine. It makes handling event-driven I/O incredibly simple, and aligns perfectly with our maniacal focus on simplicity and developer productivity. The Ruby community has quickly adopted node, and with great reason. Complimenting existing apps with node.js for components that require real-time event handling or massive concurrency is both easy and elegant – in part thanks to the availability of frameworks such as express."

"Just as the auto-industry is fragmenting as it becomes clear the majors can’t satisfy niche demand propelled by personalization, the mobile phone industry knows that the success of Apple’s iPhone is a sign that customization and personalization are now more important than engineering excellence. No manager, executive or designer is unaware of it – though we’ve seen a succession of ultra-high functionality phones launched recently, with a phone-based Sony playstation device to come."

"Parallel Global Optimization Algorithms (PGOA) provide an efficient way of dealing with hard optimization problems. One method of parallelization of GOAs that is frequently applied and commonly found in the contemporary literature is the so-called Island Model (IM). In this paper we analyze the impact of the migration topology on the performance of a PGOA which uses the Island Model. In particular we consider parallel Differential Evolution and Simulated Annealing with Adaptive Neighborhood and draw first conclusions that emerge from the conducted experiments."

"Yesterday I started using two services, UserTesting.com and fivesecondtest.com, that bring the same capital- and time-efficiency to UI design that open source tools brought to programming. Rather than work extremely hard getting the design right, then failing if you guess wrong, it is now quick and cheap to iterate. Have a crazy idea? Test it. Three alternatives? Test them."

"Markupslicer helps slicing your HTML markup into dynamic templates, used in your web applications, blog, etc."

"If we think about tests as by-products of the development process, this investment is very hard to justify because it doesn’t give direct value to any of the project stakeholders. The stakeholders of the framework, however, aren’t the customers or the business users. They are the members of the development teams (and maintenance teams if separate). Many teams I interviewed have at some point ripped out the heart of their system and replaced it, or rewritten the entire system, while keeping their acceptance tests and using them to guide the whole effort. This is where the investment in live documentation really pays off. Such a framework is genuinely a separate product, with a different lifecycle and a different group of stakeholders."

"WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines."

"Minimalist acceptance testing on top of RSpec"

"This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. As you're planning your Cloud Architecture, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Using a Data Center Relocation To Create A Virtual Infrastructure."

"What makes you think that once we write that text we “simply have to write because we’re writers,” that we’ll be compelled to put it somewhere where you can read it?"

"We will be safe so long as the present crisis is fresh in our minds and caution is the order of the day in the financial marketplace, but it won't be too long until we forget and that's when the danger begins.…"

"RATIONALITY’S NOT ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE"

"This is the beginning of a project1 to record open problems of interest to researchers in computational geometry and related fields. It commenced with the publication of thirty problems in Computational Geometry Column 42 [MO01] (see Problems 1-30), but has grown much beyond that. We encourage correspondence to improve the entries; please send email to TOPP@cs.smith.edu. If you would like to submit a new problem, please fill out this template."

"Some feel powerless because they have no control over their lives and are doing poorly at their own classes and need to demonstrate power (and their self-belief of their superior mathematical skillz) in the only venue they have, their class. Some of the rest were picked on by business majors when they were undergrads. Some of the rest really don't believe that it's possible for an educated person to be as bad at algebra as the students who attend this university."

"Maybe depressed isn’t quite the right word. “Cognizant of absurdity” captures it better (I’m sure the Germans have a good word for this). What I’m seeing on the Javitz Center floor plan is an effort by publishers to remove themselves once and for all from the people they perceive to be their customers–librarians and booksellers. And the people who actually buy the products…you know, actual readers? Of course, they continue to be completely shut out. Not invited to the party."

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it."

"As Alexander repeatedly points out, you can’t consider a construction in isolation, you have to consider the construction in context. And the context for this bench is rather remarkable: you have rather steep hills covered with trees behind you and to your right, you have the Fort Mason buildings to your left, and in front of you you have a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay, with Alcatraz and Angel Island in the distance."

"In this paper we present a Bayesian image zooming/super-resolution algorithm based on a patch based representation. We work on a patch based model with overlap and employ a Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) based approach as our data fidelity term in the Bayesian inference. The image prior imposes continuity constraints across the overlapping patches."

"We study the degree to which a character string, $Q$, leaks details about itself any time it engages in comparison protocols with a strings provided by a querier, Bob, even if those protocols are cryptographically guaranteed to produce no additional information other than the scores that assess the degree to which $Q$ matches strings offered by Bob. We show that such scenarios allow Bob to play variants of the game of Mastermind with $Q$ so as to learn the complete identity of $Q$."