It's "Connecting to the Internet"! Rock my world! Oh, hang on, it's
2012, not 1992. Which bit of the Internet, exactly?
It's "Connecting to the Internet"! Rock my world! Oh, hang on, it's
2012, not 1992. Which bit of the Internet, exactly?
Internet attacks on sovereign targets are no longer a fear for the future, but a daily threat. We ask: will the next big war be fought online?
For many, the internet is now essentially Facebook. Others find much of their online experience is mediated by Apple or Amazon. Why are the walls going up around the web garden, and does it matter?
Intellectual property, from copyrights to patents, have been an internet battlefield from the start. We look at what Sopa, Pipa and Acta really mean, and explain how this battle is not over. Plus, Clay Shirky will be discussing the issues in a live Q&A
In the UK, the ancient law of defamation is increasingly looking obsolete in the Twitter era. Meanwhile, in France, President Sarkozy believes the state can tame the web
Meet the activists and entrepreneurs who are working to keep the internet open
Hundreds of websites know vast amounts about their users' behaviour, personal lives and connections with each other. Find out who knows what about you, and what they use the information for.
Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.
Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.
The thing about hard problems is that there are many difficulties and few solutions. Sounds obvious, but what’s often overlooked is the psychological component to this asymmetry. There’s a simple reason why tackling a hard problem can lead to depressive symptoms: you’re necessarily wrong 99% of the time.
I’m getting my PhD in math, and developing a web app/startup on the side. I can tell you that one thing from my PhD research that I can carry over to my entrepreneurial ambitions is that you only have to be right 1% of the time. The hard part is, you need to be psychologically prepared to be wrong all other times.
I haven’t seen much discussion of this idea, but I’ve faced it repeatedly myself, and I often see it in others. I’ve seen it so often I’m convinced of its pervasiveness. Here’s an example. One of my peers tells me his numerics code isn’t working:
Me: Have you tried this test case?
Him: No, actually.
Me: Well that may isolate the bug.
Him: But I’m afraid that it won’t work.
Sound silly and contrived? It isn’t and I have complete sympathy for this situation. So many times in my work I’ve fantasized about the solution to an idea, and have been too afraid to implement it because of the subliminal fear that I will be, yet again, wrong. It’s a Pavlovian response to the track record of being repeatedly disappointed. Meanwhile, I delight in having new ideas, and enjoy brainstorming them. But without implementing them, the process is worthless.
The point is to be aware. If you find yourself resisting an obvious step due to an irrational fear, step back and force yourself to push onward. You only need to be right 1% of the time.
There are two really interesting points in this short (short!) article: why tackling a hard problem can lead to depressive symptoms, and how fear of failure can prevent you from exploring a possible solution.
RadioLab Short on Turing's life and legacy, featuring wonderful interviews with Janna Levin, David Leavitt, and James Gleick. Enjoy.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused with watching the video of the interview. Richard did not want to upload this interview in youtube as it is not free ('free' as in free speech/freedom, not price). He also wanted us to use a non proprietary video format like ogg theora and not the patented formats like mp4. When we chose to use dropbox to stream the video, dropbox suspended our accounts for generating excessive traffic. Kindly download the video from the icon below.
Video of the interview can be downloaded from here.
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Oh, the irony: Stallman says "...a world where people created obstacles for each other instead of cooperating."
It's true that FP articles and papers are hard to understand, but they don't have to be. The reasons for the knowledge gap are purely historical. There is nothing inherently hard about FP concepts. Consider this article "an accessible guide to FP", a bridge from our imperative minds into the world of FP. Grab a coffee and keep on reading. With any luck your coworkers will start making fun of you for your FP comments in no time.
So what is FP? How did it come about? Is it edible? If it's as useful as its advocates claim, why isn't it being used more often in the industry? Why is it that only people with PhDs tend to use it? Most importantly, why is it so damn hard to learn? What is all this closure, continuation, currying, lazy evaluation and no side effects business? How can it be used in projects that don't involve a university? Why does it seem to be so different from everything good, and holy, and dear to our imperative hearts? We'll clear this up very soon. Let's start with explaining the reasons for the huge gap between the real world and academic articles. The answer is as easy as taking a walk in the park.
It's interesting how many articles about functional programming written in the last decade are suddenly popping up on tech websites, now that FP is becoming sexy. Here's a rambling one which purports to make FP easy to grok.
