Zynganomics: 4 Secrets of the Social Gaming Business Model - http://t.co/RskJFzl5

Building a Battlestar Galactica Viper flight simulator is the ultimate extracurricular activity - http://t.co/zWCCTjTY

Monday, February 13, 2012 at 9:15AM With over 15 billion page views a month Tumblr has become an insanely popular blogging platform. Users may like Tumblr for its simplicity, its beauty, its strong focus on user experience, or its friendly and engaged community, but like it they do.Growing at over…

Last Modified: January 12, 2009 (13:20), Keywords: Concurrency, Erlang, Scala Applications are becoming increasingly concurrent, yet the traditional way of doing this, threads and locks, is very troublesome. This article highlights Erlang and Scala, two programming languages that use a different…

we’ll see a real application of this connection: determining influence in a social network. Recall that a graph is a collection of vertices (or nodes) and edges between them. The vertices are abstract nodes and edges represent some sort of relationship between them. In the case of a social network…

In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found on the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce…

Tesseract is a JavaScript library for filtering large multivariate datasets in the browser. Tesseract supports extremely fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records; we built it to power analytics for Square Register, allowing merchants to…

By: Andrea Mustain Published: 03/08/2012 10:31 AM EST on OurAmazingPlanet Filmmaker and explorer James Cameron has unveiled plans to visit the deepest place on planet Earth in the coming weeks, aboard a state-of-the-art, deep-diving craft built beneath a veil of secrecy in Australia. If successful,…

Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity http://t.co/KujgpiDh

T his week, I'd like to talk about one of our design goals in general terms so that you can gain a sense of how we're approaching the next iteration of the game. Replaying the 1981 Basic Set recently has been eye opening. Even including the rules I've added to the game, character creation took…

New at Nuketown: Thoughts on a One-Hour D&D Game http://t.co/5iXIMlmW #dndnext #dnd #rpg

Interview questions » Data Structure» Tree If the parent node links are given, the problem is transformed to find where the two nodes merge when tracing the parent links. We can first trace one link back to root and put the nodes into a set. Then we trace another link back and find the first merged…

Twitter is a fast growing website that provides a micro-blogging service. It began its life as a Ruby on Rails application, and still uses Ruby on Rails to deliver most user-facing web pages. But about a year ago they started replacing some of the back-end Ruby services with applications running on…

Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 11:46PM Update 6: Some interesting changes from Twitter's Evan Weaver: everything in RAM now, database is a backup; peaks at 300 tweets/second; every tweet followed by average 126 people; vector cache of tweet IDs; row cache; fragment cache; page cache; keep separate…

The results below were obtained using the thrift-protobuf-compare project. There you will find the source for the benchmarks used to generate the charts displayed here. The project also has a benchmarking page that compares 20+ Java serialization libraries, including Kryo. Besides the benchmark…

Jef Raskin, my father. Twenty five days before my father died, on my birthday exactly six years ago, he gave me a present. He had the sparkle back in his eye—the one that had been reduced by pancreatic cancer to an ashen ember—when he gave it to me. It was a small package, rectangular in shape, in…

Hey gang, Lately a lot of young magicians have been asking me for advice, which has caused me to remember one of the most valuable correspondences of my life: one of the most mind-blowing letters I ever received, chock-full of insights that to this very day guide my career and philosophy in both…

A couple interesting #python projects I learned about from the audience after my talk: https://t.co/qGDCNorN http://t.co/uANTTcMt

This post describes the implementation of sentiment analysis of tweets using Python and the natural language toolkit NLTK. The post also describes the internals of NLTK related to this implementation. The purpose of the implementation is to be able to automatically classify a tweet as a positive or…

On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically…

By LiamBean February 16, 2008 Fiberglass (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) is often susceptible to water incursion and/or sun damage depending on the resin used. Epoxy weakens, with time, in sunlight. Polyesters are subject to water infiltration and vinylesters are not as strong as epoxy; though are…

New iPad: a Million More Pixels Than HDTV. My review of the 3rd-gen iPad. http://t.co/Cw2iwdAb

Recently, while on vacation in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and visiting family, we stayed at my sister’s house. She was kind enough to let us have her place while she found accommodations elsewhere. She moved in to this place herself not too long ago and was proud to point out to us the brand new,…

The folks over at Pixar & Disney have released a new clip for Brave, and what’s on display warms this archery coach’s heart. It’s obvious that the filmmakers have taken considerable care to get the details right, which helps to make the story more believable and exciting. This makes total sense when…

How many meetings did you have today? This week? This month? Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were worthwhile, versus the work that you could have accomplished in that same time. This might lead one to wonder why we even have meetings at all. Now, I'm sure Tom was being facetious when he…

CityHash, a family of hash functions for strings. Introduction ============ CityHash provides hash functions for strings. The functions mix the input bits thoroughly but are not suitable for cryptography. See "Hash Quality," below, for details on how CityHash was tested and so on. We provide…

The world of LEGO has exploded over the past few years as kids (and adults) rediscover the art of assembling bricks to create a multitude of things including miniatures, mechanical devices, mosaic, and sculptures that spark the imagination. These little colored bricks have been around for…

We’re building a new service at Services called the Token Server – The idea is simple : give us a Browser ID assertion and a service name, and the Token Server will send you back a token that’s good for 30 minutes to use for the specific service. That indirection makes our live easier to manage user…

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components (discrete pieces of code…

Our son was born March 12th, 2009. He's a little over two and a half years old. Now, I am the wussiest wuss to ever wuss up the joint, so take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt – but choosing to become a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done. By far. Everything else pales in…

← blog One of the most interesting open-source projects that has been released in recent months is Storm, programmed by Nathan Marz from Backtype (now in Twitter). This video shows the basic cases for using Storm and why Storm is needed. There’s also a very good wiki where we can learn all sorts of…

the DynamoDB post by @roidrage reminds me about how good tech journalism looks like... and we need more. Link: http://t.co/oNKuyjXw

So, I decided to give it a go. Here's my foxhole radio. It's made from: a toilet roll tube, some copper wire, a blue steel razor blade, the tip of a pencil, a piece of coat hanger and an earpiece. Connected to ground and a long wire antenna in the garden it works... just. (PoW's seem to have used…

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I just need a few more minutes on the computer; then I can play with you.” I felt terrible. My four-and-a-half year old daughter, Madeline, was literally begging for my attention. As Madeline teetered toward a fit, my wife suggested that she vent her frustration by drawing her…

1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs. 2. While you're drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves. 3. If someone comes in and asks where…

Interview with Facebook's Andrei Alexandrescu http://t.co/RTfdYl0z

What’s new in Cassandra 1.1: live traffic sampling | DataStax http://t.co/JCeFnpx2

In March 2009, I gave a talk entitled How I founded, bootstrapped, grew and sold my web startups at Mesh U in Toronto, Canada. Ever since, people have been fascinated by how I incorporated Karabunga (Defensio‘s parent company) in Delaware despite living in Canada, and yet maintained the simplicity…

When someone you haven’t seen in a while asks you “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, you probably give them a high-level summary of the major life events from the months since you last spoke. When you speak to someone you see frequently, you probably respond to the same questions with close-up,…

What are the lesser-known but useful features of the Python programming language? This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned more than 10 reputation on this site. In case you're thinking it's doing 1 < x, which comes…