- The Email Game — game mechanics to get you answering email more efficiently. Can’t wait to hear that conversation with corporate IT. “You want us to install what on the Exchange server?” (via Demo Day Wrapup)
- Stratified B-trees and versioning dictionaries — A classic versioned data structure in storage and computer science is the copy-on-write (CoW) B-tree — it underlies many of today’s file systems and databases, including WAFL, ZFS, Btrfs and more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t inherit the B-tree’s optimality properties; it has poor space utilization, cannot offer fast updates, and relies on random IO to scale. Yet, nothing better has been developed since. We describe the `stratified B-tree’, which beats all known semi-external memory versioned B-trees, including the CoW B-tree. In particular, it is the first versioned dictionary to achieve optimal tradeoffs between space, query and update performance. (via Bob Ippolito)
- DisplayCabinet (Ben Bashford) — We embedded a group of inanimate ornamental objects with RFID tags. Totems or avatars that represent either people, products or services. We also added RFID tags to a set of house keys and a wallet. Functional things that you carry with you. This group of objects combine with a set of shelves containing a hidden projector and RFID reader to become DisplayCabinet. (via Chris Heathcote)
- shairport — Aussie pulled the encryption keys from an Airport Express device, so now you can have software pretend to be an Airport Express.
"algorithms" entries
Trading on sentiment
Sentiment analysis gives algorithmic trading an edge
Sorting through thousands of news stories and categorizing information based on mood and tone creates useful data points for financial systems.
Strata Week: Overcharging algorithms
Algorithms go awry on Amazon, the future of Hadoop at Yahoo, and the Supreme Court mulls data mining
In this Strata Week: Algorithm pricing on Amazon pushes the price of a biology book to astronomical levels, Yahoo weighs the future of Hadoop, and the Supreme Court hears arguments about a Vermont law restricting the data mining of prescription records.
Four short links: 12 April 2011
Email Game, Faster B Trees, RFID+Projectors, and Airport Express Broken
In the future we'll be talking, not typing
Stephan Spencer on how autonomous intelligence and language processing will transform search.
Stephan Spencer, co-author of "The Art of SEO," says searching the Internet of the future will be like talking to a human being.
Smarter search looks for influence rather than links
A Princeton search algorithm uses language indicators to measure importance.
A search algorithm being developed by Princeton University researchers parses language to determine relevance. Academic application is one possibility, but this type of algorithm could also extend to news recommendations.
Four short links: 26 January 2011
Identifying Communities, Web Principles, Wiring Library, and Instapaper Interview
- Find Communities — algorithm for uncovering communities in networks of millions of nodes, for producing identifiable subgroups as in LinkedIn InMaps. (via Matt Biddulph’s Delicious links)
- Seven Ways to Think Like The Web (Jon Udell) — seven principles that will head off a lot of mistakes. They should be seared into the minds of anyone working in the web. 2. Pass by reference rather than by value. [pass URLs, not copies of data] […] Why? Nobody else cares about your data as much as you do. If other people and other systems source your data from a canonical URL that you advertise and control, then they will always get data that’s as timely and accurate as you care to make it.
- Wire It — an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages, graphical modeling, or graph editors. (via Pete Warden)
- Interview with Marco Arment (Rands in Repose) — Most people assume that online readers primarily view a small number of big-name sites. Nearly everyone who guesses at Instapaper’s top-saved-domain list and its proportions is wrong. The most-saved site is usually The New York Times, The Guardian, or another major traditional newspaper. But it’s only about 2% of all saved articles. The top 10 saved domains are only about 11% of saved articles. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper Feed)
Four short links: 16 December 2010
Compressing Graphs, Authentication Usability, Extreme Design, and Rails Geo
- On Compressing Social Networks (PDF) — paper looking at the theory and practice of compressing social network graphs. Our main innovation here is to come up with a quick and useful method for generating an ordering on the social network nodes so that nodes with lots of common neighbors are near each other in the ordering, a property which is useful for compression (via My Biased Coin, via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
- Requiring Email and Passwords for New Accounts (Instapaper blog) — a list of reasons why the simple signup method of “pick a username, passwords are optional” turned out to be trouble in the long run. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper feed)
- Extreme Design — building the amazing spacelog.org in an equally-amazing fashion. I want a fort.
- rgeo — a new geo library for Rails. (via Daniel Azuma via Glen Barnes on Twitter)
Four short links: 7 December 2010
Data Structures, Technoptimism, China, and Web Math
- Synopsis Data Structures for Massive Data Sets (PDF) — survey of data structures that reduce the problem space when dealing with large data sets. (via Pete Warden)
- Optimism — you build what you’re thinking of. Time to figure out the optimistic future and build that. “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.” –attributed to Alasdair Gray.
- Velocity China — in case you were wondering, yes: China is on our radar.
- MathJax — open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers. As Edd said: “I love how there’s enough power in JavaScript to extend browsers without needing to ask permission.”
Four short links: 30 November 2010
Git Library, Uncocked Open Data, Role of Editorial, and Network Neutrality Salvo
- libgit2 — a linkable git library. Ruby and Python bindings.
- Open Data: How Not to Cock It Up — Tom Steinberg lays it out.
- Algorithm and Crowd are Not Enough — My point isn’t that Google, Netflix, Amazon, Yelp or any of the others are doomed. But I do think there’s an opportunity brewing for entrepreneurs, websites and companies to add editorial components to the algo-crowd paradigm. O’Reilly’s business is built on editorial value, whether in book selection or conference creation. We obviously see a continued role for editorial presence. (via John Battelle on Twitter)
- Level 3 vs Comcast (Denver Post) — first shakedown from the carriers. Without mandated neutral carriers, the Internet will dissolve into a fiefdom of consolidated big players willing to pay the shakedowns of the telco goons.
Four short links: 8 November 2010
xkcd Incarnate, Git Lover, Algorithm Design, and a Gameboy in Javascript
- xkcd 576 Made Real — a Kiwi coder used the API to the local equivalent of eBay to build a real-life version of xkcd cartoon 576. You can follow its daily purchases on Twitter.
- Linus Torvalds’ Greatest Invention (Dominus) — slides to a talk Mark Jason Dominus gave to the Philadelphia Linux User Group. I like to see informed critical appreciation of technical works like this.
- The Design of Approximation Algorithms — textbook available for free download. (via Hacker News)
- Gameboy Emulation in Javascript — at some point surely I’ll cease to be amazed with what can be done in the browser with Javascript and HTML now, but I’m not at that point yet.