WesSS: Wes Syndication Stream

Talpiot and Israeli psychometrics

2011-09-17T16:11:00Z

The other day I was discussing the Israeli Talpiot program with another Caltecher. I thought it would be great if we had a similar program in the US. He said it sounded like Ender's Game :-)

If anyone out there is an expert on the Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (their SAT-equivalent), please contact me. We're trying to determine the +3 SD cutoff (relative to the US population) for our GWAS.

See earlier post on Talpiot and Israeli startups.

USAToday: ... The "Talpiot" program is perhaps the best reflection of the army's technological drive.

The unit, one of the most selective in the military, was formed in the wake of the 1973 war, when Israel was caught off guard and lost some 2,500 men.

"One of the lessons was that we need a technological edge over our enemies and we need to develop this edge from within," said Talpiot's commander, Maj. Amir Schlachet.

In Israel, where military service is mandatory, more than 5,000 young people apply to Talpiot each year, hoping to be among the 50 or so accepted. They must pass a grueling battery of tests in math, physics, group dynamics, leadership skills and intelligence.

The reward: a nine-year commitment, beginning with a 3½-year dual bachelor's degree program in mathematics and physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Vacations are spent jumping out of airplanes and participating in other military exercises. Along the way, roughly one out of five soldiers leave the program, Schlachet said.

Those who survive go on to careers as officers in some of the military's most prestigious operations, mostly in research and development projects, Schlachet said. From there, the 500-odd Talpiot grads have tended to find their way to the upper echelons of business and academia, he said.

"You learn self-confidence, not to be afraid of anything. No subject is too complex to go after, and no answer should be taken for granted," said Talpiot grad Gilad Almogy, 38, Applied Materials' top executive in Israel.

The Nasdaq-traded biotech company Compugen was formed by three of Almogy's Talpiot comrades. A fourth, Mor Amitai, now runs the company.

Amitai says some of the most complicated work he ever did was during his time in Talpiot. "The experience of sometimes succeeding, almost always as part of a team, involving something that really seemed impossible, I think this is something we took with us," he said.

Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing

2011-09-18T17:52:34Z

We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links:

InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions
MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability

This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 G6, with 72GB of RAM and RAID10 on 8 disks.

I took sysbench multi-tables workload, with 20 tables, 10,000,000 rows each. Total database size ~58GB.
MySQL version: 5.5.16

Initial benchmark, which InnoDB configured for this hardware
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2 innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT innodb_log_buffer_size = 16M innodb_buffer_pool_size = 52G innodb_log_file_size = 1900M innodb_log_files_in_group = 2

In my benchmark I measure results each 10 sec, and when we graph it, it looks like:

Basically there two stages: MySQL handles traffic and MySQL stuck. As you see stalls are very severe.
There are 4 mins periods, when MySQL is not able to process query.

Why this happens: referring to previous InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions post, InnoDB during this time is “sync” flushing mode. It allows itself to go in this state,
as we have a lot of memory, and we can do changes in memory much faster than on disk. InnoDB is not able
to catch up with flushing changed data.

With widely adoption of MySQL 5.5 and servers with big memory configuration I expect we will see this problem more and more often on production systems.

How to diagnose it?
This is question I am asked, how do we know that stall we see is related to InnoDB flushing and “sync” state.

Vanilla MySQL does not provide much diagnostic there, but there couple numbers to look into.
If you take “SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS”, look into following sections:
Log flushed up to 135550126707 Last checkpoint at 132524978607 ... Pending writes: LRU 0, flush list 105, single page 0

First, Pending writes “flush list” > 0 says that InnoDB does perform a lot of flushing,
and if this number grow, that means InnoDB flushes more than your IO system can afford.
Second, you need to a little math. (“Log flushed up to” – “Last checkpoint at”) this is our checkpoint age. In our case it is 3025148100 or 2885M . Our summary log size is 3800M. InnoDB usually takes 75% mark as limit for “sync” stage ( 3800M * 0.75 = 2850M ). That is checkpoint age exceeds 75% sync mark, that is signal that InnoDB performs in “sync” flushing mode.
So math formula for this: if (“Log flushed up to” – “Last checkpoint at”) > “total log size” * 0.75 , then InnoDB is in “sync” mode.

What to do?
I whish I could say you should use Percona Server with XtraDB.
If we were using SSD as storage, then I would recommend it. Vanilla MySQL performs equally bad on SSD and
HDD, while for SSD in Percona Server we have “innodb_adaptive_flushing_method = keep_average”.

Unfortunately on spinning disks (as in this case), Percona Server may not show significant improvement. I am going to followup with results on Percona Server.

So first recommendation you may hear in this case from the Oracle/MySQL engineers is to decrease “innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct”, this way InnoDB will try to keep less dirty pages in buffer pool,
and hopefully it will spend less time in “sync” flushing.

Let’s see what we can get if we set
innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct=30

Although maximal throughput decreased and stall period is somewhat shorter, I cannot see this is helpful.

Second action what you may try, is to decrease innodb_log_file_size. How this may help ? InnoDB flushing may kick-in faster, and do not allow to have a lot of modified pages in buffer pool.
Let’s try it:

Well, stability and absolute value of throughput are far from perfect, but, at least, we do not have 4 min stalls.

Will it help if we decrease innodb_buffer_pool (effectively killing idea that more memory is better), the same way InnoDB will not be able to change a lot of data .

The following results are with innodb_buffer_pool_size=39G. There I keep Y scale as first graph to show impact on performance by this action.

Finally we got somewhat stable result without stalls, but by loosing about 20x throughput.

These facts give me idea that existing InnoDB flushing algorithm is not suitable for modern hardware with a lot of memory. I hope there is work in progress for MySQL 5.6.

Scripts and raw results you can find there.

Follow @VadimTk

Teddybears

2011-09-17T08:38:00Z

It's not often I get to use both my "music" and "furries" tags.

Announcing Trello

2011-09-17T06:39:31Z

Shared by Wes Maldonado
I'm at a loss for words.

Around the time of Fog Creek Software's ten year anniversary, I started thinking that if we want to keep our employees excited and motivated for another ten years, we were going to need some new things to work on. It occurred to me that we could easily afford to make four little two-person teams to launch four new products. That would give our developers more chances to move around from product to product when they got bored, which would make Fog Creek Software an even better place to work.

Each team, we decided, would be guided by the spirit of lean startups. They would ship early and often. They would listen to real-world customers instead of building things in an ivory tower. And they wouldn't be afraid to pivot endlessly until they made something that people wanted.

Next, we needed some business ideas. After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was "why the hell are you working on THAT?" So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.

We had an early idea called FIVE THINGS. Everybody would have a list of exactly five things that they were allowed to work on. The top two were things they were actively doing right now. The other three were things that they would do as soon as they finished the first two. But nobody was ever allowed to have SIX things assigned to them. If you have too many things on your to-do list, your motivation tends to sag.

Five Things wasn't the right idea, but it led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful. By the end of the summer we realized we had a hit on our hands: an incredibly simple, easy-to-understand way for teams to collaborate online.

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Fog Creek's newest product: Trello.

Read more about what Trello does
Sign up, it's awesome!

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Announcing Trello

2011-09-13T17:44:10Z

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Fog Creek's newest product: Trello.

Read more about what Trello does
Sign up, it's awesome!

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

JavaScript Destructuring Assignment

2011-09-11T23:00:00Z

On following the commentary around My TXJS Talk by Brendan Eich, I noticed a debate on Twitter between @brendaneich and several developers about one particular facet in the talk: destructuring. I wanted to take a look a this area and give some examples that illustrate why it might be useful to JavaScript developers in general.

Is destructuring an unnecessary language feature that just lets us swap values, or is there more to it?

What is Destructuring?

Many languages include pattern matching features that make pattern matching more expressive and concise. Pattern matching just means the ability to check a sequence of things for a given pattern; regular expressions are an obvious example. Functional languages include other pattern matching features, and one is called destructuring. Common Lisp includes a destructuring-bind macro, and there’s an example of this in On Lisp by Paul Graham in Destructuring on Lists.

In Clojure, let supports abstract structural binding:

(let [[a b] [1 2 3]]
  (println "a:" a " b:" b))

This will print “a: 1 b: 2”. In Lisp it’s easy to see why destructuring is useful because the language is based around lists, and it has so many useful tools for dealing with them.

In JavaScript

As JavaScript 1.7 destructuring assignment is supported. That means you can use it in Mozilla’s interpreters and Firefox 2+. The canonical example is value swapping:

var a = 1, b = 2;
[a, b] = [b, a];
// a = 2, b = 1

That’s not particularly exciting unless you need to swap around lots of values, but what might be convenient for some APIs is the implications it has for return values:

function f() {
  return [1, 2];
}

var a, b;
[a, b] = f();

That’s potentially useful, but also potentially confusing. Do we really need destructuring assignment? Well, let’s think about it in the context of Lisp again. What makes destructuring useful in Lisp-like languages is dealing with lisps. Similarly, in JavaScript the Object unlocks a great deal of power and flexibility.

Destructuring assignment in the context of Object gives rise to this:

var o = { name: 'Alex', permissions: 'Admin', email: 'alex@example.com' };
var {name, email} = o;

That sets a variable called name to 'Alex' and one called email to alex@example.com. Imagine combining this with iterations over JSON returned from an API, and it should be obvious where a lot of unnecessarily verbose code can be made more concise.

Introducing Fech

2011-08-29T20:08:49Z

Introducing Fech, a Ruby gem for parsing presidential electronic campaign finance filings from the Federal Election Commission.

Some water towers just want to watch the world burn.

2011-09-07T22:15:09Z

U-Link Progress Report

2011-08-31T18:32:48Z

I just found this nifty little widget. Given all the things that can go wrong with tunneling, I’ll feel a lot better once all these machines punch through to the other side. That’s not to say tunneling is never worthwhile or that it’s even likely that something will go wrong. It’s just one of the larger technical risks in a project of this nature.

On the Pixelmator 2.0 Shipping Date

2011-09-07T06:19:33Z

Shared by Wes Maldonado
"Pixelmator 2.0 is late because we put our hearts into it and want it to be perfect. But it looks like perfection requires some more time."

We expected to ship Pixelmator 2.0 Chameleon sometime this summer. But the summer is almost gone, and the app is not out yet. Why is it still late even though we worked very hard and had zero serious technical issues?

In fact, it’s simple—Pixelmator 2.0 is late because we put our hearts into it and want it to be perfect. But it looks like perfection requires some more time.

As of today, we think we have done a great job on nearly everything we touched in Pixelmator 2.0: the look and feel of the app; the fantastic new vector, type, retouching, and many other tools; the exclusive OS X Lion support; hundreds of lovely details; and much more. But hey, we still would like to squash bugs and improve some little things that we think should be improved before the release.

I assure you that the upgrade is worth every single moment of your wait, and I kindly ask you to excuse our tardiness and allow us a few more weeks to release a totally perfect Pixelmator 2.0. After all, we do this for you and care very much about what you think of our creation.

While I am getting back to work on shipping the app as soon as possible, I hope you enjoy a short movie we made about the new Eyedropper Tool in Pixelmator 2.0.

Nice animation showing how wide the bike lane really is.

2011-08-31T00:02:53Z

According to the SFMTA, dooring is the second most common form of injury collision involving cyclists, behind unsafe speed, though the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) points out that dooring is the highest injury collision type caused by motorists or their passengers.

Getting a more complete financial picture of Stay-At-Home parenting

2011-08-19T00:09:04Z

Now that more of my friends have kids, it's interesting to see how couples choose to divide up paid employment vs childcare. My favorite so far is the Bensons, who each work at paid employment a few days of the week, so they take turns with childcare. It looks like the Kullas do something similar. This is less practical when your baby is breastfeeding exclusively and won't take a bottle, or when both parents can't work from home (or farm). But there are probably as many different ways to handle this as there are couples.

Of all reasons to stay at home, obviously the best is non-financial: to raise your own children. This post isn't about that, it's about the money. The typical economic formula people use to figure out if they should return to paid employment after having a child is:

S - C

Where S is the salary of the potential stay-at-home (SAH) parent, and C is the cost of child care. If S is more than C, then grab your briefcase and get back out there in the working world!

I'd like to propose a slightly more realistic formula:

S - (C + E)

Where E is "everything else a SAH parent can do at home to contribute to the family's bottom line." Here are some ways that our family is saving by having one parent at home (usually Venessa, though she is back to working at home...YUM!). I've also included an estimated yearly cost if we had two parents with paid employment¹:

* First, the value of C: a full-time nanny for a year = $30,000
* We have time to launder cloth diapers and wipes = $750
* Venessa can nurse Lillia, so we don't need formula, bottles, pump, etc. = $1,200
* We have time to bargain shop at thrift stores or pick up craigslist finds = $350
* We're paying less income tax = $5,000
* I can take lunch from home (leftovers from homemade meals) = $500
* Also, when we go out for dinner it's by choice, not due to time constraints (i.e. we dine out less) = $250
* I commute by bike, and Venessa's paid employment is at home = $1000
* Many of our daytime hobbies (beekeeping, canning, gardening, chickens) are money-saving = $500

That's approximately a $40k salary right there, or a $19 hourly wage at a 40hr/week job. There are probably some other factors that I'm forgetting or that are harder to quantify (e.g. children in daycare get sick more often at first).

There are a few caveats to keep in mind:

* Will you be leaving any workplace perks behind? 401k match, life insurance, etc.
* Will you be able to get back into the workforce when you're ready?
* What if the person with paid employment gets laid off? I recommend everyone having a 3 - 6 month emergency fund, but this is especially important for parents.

Like I said, this is a very personal decision. I just want to make sure people are looking at the complete picture when they make this decision for their family.

¹ Source: http://www.babycenter.com/baby-cost-calculator and http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/12/17/the-real-value-of-stay-at-home-parenting/ This is going to vary a lot from family to family, based on many factors.

Real Life Mario Coin Block

2011-08-19T22:20:44Z

Hark.com now offers mixing up some sounds with your favorite photos. Check out this photo originally from http://nullpoint.imgur.com/be_mario#P0Siy mixed up with the coin sound from Mario Brothers

Go check it out!

Super Mario Bros. Coin Block

New Tech Talk: Metrics, Metrics Everywhere

2011-07-27T00:22:00Z

If you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. Coda Hale, Infrastructure Architect at Yammer, talks about service-level performance metrics, how they use them to guide their development strategy, and how you can improve the transparency of your own software.

This talk was recorded on a laptop webcam. We hope the reduced quality doesn't affect your enjoyment of the talk

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

The 5 Phases of Big Data Adoption

2011-08-12T15:36:00Z

Denial. Resistance. Acceptance. Embrace. Survival.

When talking about BigData adoption we must consider it at least from 2 perspectives: companies and end users. And for both cases adoption seems to be going through the same 5 phases listed above: denial, resistance, acceptance, embrace, survival.

Let’s firstly imagine how the 5 phases of big data adoption look for companies:

denial or there’s no such thing as BigData. Even if BigData is talked about for years and Google has been mentioning it in connection with all their technologies and solutions, not everyone believes there’s something called BigData. Maybe also the lack of a definition is helping with the denial. But when facing the 3 V’s: volume, variety, velocity— or even the 4 V’s: volume, velocity, variability, variety—you should recognize that its BigData.
resistance. Preparing for BigData is expensive and the results are uncertain. So who can guarantee the return on investment?
acceptance. Firstly it was only Google doing it. Now it is every other startup. So there must be something about it.
embrace: a whole (new) ecosystem is building around BigData. Once you have the data you can start making sense of it. But you need the data first and you better start collecting it instead of waiting for off-the-shelf technologies.
survival: the moment when the investments of the company in collecting, storing, analyzing Big Data start paying off.

For users the 5 phases of big data adoption are a bit more complicated:

denial: WTF is BigData and why would I care?
resistance: What is it for me?

Users are asked to give away more and more information but what they are getting back is not so obvious. Take Facebook as an example: it’s encouraging users to share more information about themselves and in an as public as possible way. On the other hand, under the umbrella of protecting privacy, Facebook doesn’t share that information (even if you want it to) with anyone else except their advertising clients.
acceptance: all my friends are OK with sharing more data and it doesn’t seem to do them any harm. Not to mention that all the companies collecting my data are anonymizying it, so there’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Unfortunately this is not completely true and Pete Warden’s post is an eye opener:

Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion^[1]. Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone’s actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records.
embrace: the light at the end of the tunnel is too bright to ignore it. The promises you hear are too appealing. So you open the gates: you share your location, your habits, you add sensors and collect data from your house and car, you authorize your bank to share your data.
survival: as for companies, you start to see the benefits: no more absurd ads when browsing, no more hidden fees from your bank account, reduced household costs.

The moment when BigData starts to pay back looks like a movie happy end with everyone benefiting from it. Not only those producing it, not only those monetizing it, not only those storing and processing it. But everyone.

Next exercise: Big Data Hype Cycle.

My emphasis. ↩

TornadoGuard

2011-08-12T04:00:00Z

Strubklamm GC14D8W GEOCACHE OF THE WEEK – August 1, 2011

2011-08-01T15:44:12Z

Strubklamm GC14D8W

Not far from Salzburg, Austria a daring adventure waits among the steep cliffs that shoulder the Almbach River. Strubklamm (GC14D8W) is a difficulty five, terrain five geocache placed by Baumrinde & sternfänger in 2007.

The cache owners ask geocachers to understand the risks, find the cache in groups and bring the proper equipment. The list of equipment includes a wetsuit, helmet and climbing gear.

Strubklamm GC14D8W

The cache container is located down a steep gorge. There’s more than just a cache to be found at this location. Cachers will navigate to the gorge, then climb up the canyon walls to jump off of perches (again and again) into a deep, refreshing pool of water. Some who logged a smiley on the cache say they jumped from as high as 13 meters (42 feet) into the water below.

Strubklamm GC14D8W

Continue your exploration of some of the most engaging geocaches from around the world. Explore all the Geocaches of the Week on our blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com

What is the difference?

2011-08-01T03:24:00Z

Some excerpts from a talk by Richard Hamming (inventor of, among other things, hamming codes) on how to do great research. I recommend reading the whole thing!

You and Your Research: ... At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?'' and ``What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences. And that's what this talk is about.

... How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains. Brains are measured in various ways. In mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, typically brains correlates to a great extent with the ability to manipulate symbols. And so the typical IQ test is apt to score them fairly high. On the other hand, in other fields it is something different. For example, Bill Pfann, the fellow who did zone melting, came into my office one day. He had this idea dimly in his mind about what he wanted and he had some equations. It was pretty clear to me that this man didn't know much mathematics and he wasn't really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it home and did a little work. I finally showed him how to run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate.

And I can cite another person in the same way. I trust he isn't in the audience, i.e. a fellow named Clogston. I met him when I was working on a problem with John Pierce's group and I didn't think he had much. I asked my friends who had been with him at school, ``Was he like that in graduate school?'' ``Yes,'' they replied. Well I would have fired the fellow, but J. R. Pierce was smart and kept him on. Clogston finally did the Clogston cable. After that there was a steady stream of good ideas. One success brought him confidence and courage.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, ``What would the average random code do?'' He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

... Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. ...

I found this transcript via a discussion of learning and spaced repetition.

Tax Questions from the Future

2011-08-01T07:54:38Z

Does gay marriage include corporate persons, or is it still discriminatorily phrased so as to exclude legal persons who happen to not be made of meat?

Let's say General Dynamics and Katy Perry love each other very much, travel to New York and get hitched. Is that legal even though one of them is still incorporated in Delaware? And does the other one get a deduction in California?

My uh, friend really needs to know.

Previously, previously.

Someone Is Monetizing Big Data and It Is Not for Our Benefit

2011-07-19T17:19:00Z

Someone Is Monetizing Big Data and It Is Not for Our Benefit:

Similarly some of the banks have admitted that they will be mining data related to the transactions we perform to understand our buying behavior. This data can then be sold to retailers or e-marketers to generate specific offers that may suit our lifestyle. It may be creepy to get an e-coupon out of the blue on your birthday (or anniversary) from a retailer that you would have shopped with some time back, but it could also have some nice benefits. On top of that, each one of us leaves behind digital tracks when we search or browse through different sites looking for something on the internet. If such data can be tagged to us, it can demonstrate our common interests.

Call me a privacy freak, but I find this unacceptable. And I have a very hard time understanding what’s in it for us^[1].

That’s the mildest form to say that I cannot really imagine any benefits for us. ↩

WesSS: Wes Syndication Stream

Talpiot and Israeli psychometrics

Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing

Teddybears

Announcing Trello

Announcing Trello

JavaScript Destructuring Assignment

What is Destructuring?

In JavaScript

Further Reading

Related Topics in Other Languages

Introducing Fech

Some water towers just want to watch the world burn.

U-Link Progress Report

On the Pixelmator 2.0 Shipping Date

Nice animation showing how wide the bike lane really is.

Getting a more complete financial picture of Stay-At-Home parenting

Real Life Mario Coin Block

New Tech Talk: Metrics, Metrics Everywhere

The 5 Phases of Big Data Adoption

TornadoGuard

Strubklamm GC14D8W GEOCACHE OF THE WEEK – August 1, 2011

What is the difference?

Tax Questions from the Future

Someone Is Monetizing Big Data and It Is Not for Our Benefit