Development.. or Something Like It.
Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, World events and just random cool stuff!
Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, World events and just random cool stuff!
Obviously VCs just want to add users, because that increases the valuations of these companies… But the truth is that the users don’t last. You can dump a ton of new eyeballs onto a product and blow up your install count. If you’re smart, you can get a quick sale. But if the product sucks, people stop coming back.” Stokes told me.
The truth, says Pakman, is that startups are becoming a species of professional wrestler, each one more inflated than the next. “What we’ve got now is an abundance of scale. Having millions of users has become much less of a differentiator among sites. What we’re lacking is innovation around business models, and that is what will allow us to create sustainable, profitable companies.”
In 1972, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an article called “Missed Opportunities.” In it, he describes how relativity could have been discovered many years before Einstein announced his findings if mathematicians in places like Göttingen had spoken to physicists who were poring over Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetism. The ingredients were there in 1865 to make the breakthrough—only announced by Einstein some 40 years later.
It is striking that Dyson should have written about scientific ships passing in the night. Shortly after he published the piece, he was responsible for an abrupt collision between physics and mathematics that produced one of the most remarkable scientific ideas of the last half century: that quantum physics and prime numbers are inextricably linked.
A very interesting read
“What the equation did was give everyone the confidence to trade options and very quickly, much more complicated financial options known as derivatives,” he says.
Scholes thought his equation would be useful. He didn’t expect it to transform the face of finance. But it quickly became obvious that it would.
“About the time we had published this article, that’s 1973, simultaneously or approximately a month thereafter, the Chicago Board Options Exchange started to trade call options on 16 stocks,” he recalls.
Scholes had just moved to the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues had already been teaching the Black-Scholes formula and methodology to students for several years.
“There were many young traders who either had taken courses at MIT or Chicago in using the option pricing technology. On the other hand, there was a group of traders who had only intuition and previous experience. And in a very short period of time, the intuitive players were essentially eliminated by the more systematic players who had this pricing technology.”
That was just the beginning..
“Japanese kids today feel that if anything goes wrong for them, it will be disastrous for the entire family,” says Fujiwara. “So they don’t even want to try. There is a mismatch between their aspirations and their willingness to work to achieve them ‘no matter what.’ They thought material and digital connections would be enough, but they’re discovering that they and their parents were wrong. Today’s Japanese kids are incredibly unhappy.”
Looks pretty neat. A Haskell type syntax and compiles to JS and HTML
Announced at GigaOm Structure Data event, Google launches a new BigData service named BigQuery:
BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any upfront hardware or software investments.
A quick bullet point list of BigQuery features and limitations:
- BigQuery is ideal for running queries over vast amounts of data—up to billions of rows—with great speed.
- BigQuery is good for analyzing vast quantities of data quickly, but not for modifying it. In data analysis terms, BigQuery is an OLAP (online analytical processing) system.
- You can import data into BigQuery as CSV data, where it is stored in the cloud in a relatively small number of tables with no explicit relationship to each other.
- BigQuery isn’t a database system:
- It doesn’t support table indexes or other database management features.
- BigQuery supports a specialized subset of SQL; it doesn’t support update or delete requests.
- BigQuery supports joins only when one side of the join is much smaller than the other.
- BigQuery can be used by any client able to send REST commands over the Internet.
After the break you can watch the 15 minutes video recorded at the GigaOm event.
Authors: Sébastien Kunz-Jacques, Paul Jouguet
Quantum Key Distribution is a secret distribution technique that requires an authenticated channel. This channel is usually created on top of an un-authenticated communication medium using unconditionally secure message authentication codes (MAC) and an initial common secret. We examine the consequences of replacing this MAC algorithm by a cryptographic hash-based signature algorithm, like the Lamport algorithm, and show that in practical settings it results in an increase of the security of QKD and ease its deployment.
There’s virtually a petro-politics story a day right now. If it’s not the two Sudans on the verge of war, it’s a sudden resurgence of economic nationalism in Argentina, where the government gave Repsol 15 minutes to pack their bags, or economic growth slowing in India because there’s not enough coal, or even arguments over whether an independent Scotland would be oil-dependent or not.
There’s no escaping the geopolitics of energy. This has got to be the single biggest axiom for the IMF, now reviewing its ideas on how to advise governments on oil and other extractive industries, to take on board. It’s the politics, stupid. Counterintuitive, perhaps, for an institution whose whole raison d’etre is to eschew politics and achieve technocratic nirvana. But, perversely, any policymaking for the oil industry that fails to take into account the specific nature of rents - money for nothing and the things people will do to get near it - is doomed to perfection on paper and irrelevance, at best, in the real world.
It may seem hard to believe that a billion-dollar acquisition could be ignored, but consider these facts: Photo-sharer Instagram has 13 people on staff; Facebook has more than 3,000. Facebook’s valuation is arguably 100 times Instagram’s. Facebook, with its initial public offering approaching, and the exposure and pressure to grow that comes with being public, is going to have its hands full of top priorities. Many of those priorities will have more at stake than a billion dollars. And let’s not forget that Facebook is likely to use its soon-to-be-public stock and IPO cash to make additional acquisitions. Many of them may be small companies with technologies that Facebook wants to plug into its burgeoning network. Those companies, too, could get lost in Facebook.
a lawnchair is sorta like a couch except smaller and outside. perfect for html5 mobile apps that need a lightweight, adaptive, simple and elegant persistence solution.
lawnchair instance is really just an array of objects.(Source: willjardine)
This is a fascinating read! Going to attempt to implement this.
Traditional password based authentication schemes are mostly considered in single server environments. They are unfitted for the multi-server environments from two aspects. On the one hand, users need to register in each server and to store large sets of data, including identities and passwords. On the other hand, servers are required to store a verification table containing user identities and passwords. Recently, On the base on Sood et al.’s protocol(2011), Li et al. proposed an improved dynamic identity based authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture(2012). Li et al. claims that the proposed scheme can make up the security weaknesses of Sood et al.’s protocol. Unfortunately, our further research shows that Li et al.’s protocol contains several drawbacks and can not resist some types of known attacks, such as replay attack, Deny-of-Service attack, internal attack, eavesdropping attack, masquerade attack, and so on. In this paper, we further propose a light dynamic pseudonym identity based authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture. In our scheme, service providing servers don’t need to maintain verification tables for users. The proposed protocol provides not only the declared security features in Li et al.’s paper, but also some other security features, such as traceability and identity protection.
“Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. The sweeping victory of his successor, Barack Obama, represented more a repudiation of Bush and his policies than anything else, and leading political activists, left and right alike, characterized Obama as Bush’s absolute antithesis, both in background and in ideology. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity. Yet almost none of these reversals took place. Instead, the continuity of administration policy has been so complete and so obvious that many critics now routinely speak of the Bush/Obama administration.”
— Ron Unz: China’s Rise, America’s Fall
(Source: theamericanconservative.com, via azspot)
Authors: Jingjin Yu, Steven M. LaValle
For the problem of moving a set of agents on a connected graph with unit edge distance to agent-specific goal locations, free of collisions, we propose two multiflow based integer linear programming (ILP) models that find time optimal and distance optimal solutions, respectively. The resulting algorithms from our ILP models are complete and guaranteed to yield true optimal solutions. Focusing on the time optimal formulation, we evaluate its performance, both as a stand alone algorithm and as a generic heuristic for quickly solving large problem instances. The computational results confirm the effectiveness of our method.
