Tomorrow’s cover today: as robots grow more autonomous, society needs to develop rules to manage them.
I love the Economist. Looking forward to their take on robotic ethics.
Various Computer Latencies
This was sent to me by @j2labs. Love it.
L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict 5 ns
L2 cache reference 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
Main memory reference 100 ns
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns
Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns
Disk seek 10,000,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 ns
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns
By Jeff Dean (http://research.google.com/people/jeff/):
nReduce does not believe in artificial barriers. We accept any team that can reasonably say they’ll be able to develop and ship every week. We expect many to apply and no one who really wants to be in the program will be declined.
—
hmm
A cure for your incubator fatigue: Meet nReduce, the open-source Y Combinator | VentureBeat
(via fred-wilson)Terrible idea. By accepting everyone, this program stands for nothing in particular. It will be composed of a hodge-podge of anybody’s with no sense of direction.
The lack of direction is captured beautifully in the original, misinformed name: N Combinator.
(via fred-wilson)
David Beazley on the evolution of CPython.
Documentary on IIT, an incredibly good university in India. Possibly the world’s best technology school.
Big difference, right? Ex.fm should fix that.
Two aliases I like
I tend to develop around abstractions. In Python, this tendency manifests itself as multiple Python packages.
As I develop them, I find I need to play around with my $PYTHONPATH. But I can’t stand typing a long command over and over, so I put together two aliases that I use all the time.
pythisdir
alias pythisdir='export PYTHONPATH=$PWD'
I use this command basically to support building tests or building demos. When I’m not sure what I’m trying to build, but I have rough ideas, I start writing demos. I think the code should look like this. And then I make it true.
This looks like having a project_dir/ and project_dir/demos/ directory. Working on a project, then, looks roughly like this:
$ cd ~/Projects/
$ pythisdir
$ cd demos
$ triforce
The next alias is triforce. I use this when I’m working on Brubeck. The things I’m doing in Brubeck often feed back into DictShield modifications, so I will setup a virtualenv with everything I need, except for Brubeck and DictShield, and I’ll add them via this alias.
alias triforce='export PYTHONPATH=$PWD:$HOME/Projects/dictshield:$HOME/Projects/brubeck'
The alias also includes the current directory, in case I’m building a site in Brubeck. Sites themselves inform Brubeck design decisions, which inform DictShield design decisions.
I really enjoy when abstractions teach other new ideas. It’s like a few little identities all figuring out how to be compatible and efficient. Hello, Mr. Brubeck! And great to see you, Mr. DictShield! Are you ready to jam on some Readify?
Feels like a milestone.
Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech about succeeding in the arts.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
0 play(s)
Laurel Halo: Quarantine
New Laurel Halo!
She’s a regular in my coding soundtrack.
