"lua" entries

Four short links: 14 May 2013

Four short links: 14 May 2013

Privacy: Gone in 150ms, Pen-Testing Tablet, Low-Level in Lua, and Metaphor Identification Shootout

  1. Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve just as much chance of getting it back. (via John Battelle)
  2. pwnpad — Nexus 7 with Android and Ubuntu, high-gain USB bluetooth, ethernet adapter, and a gorgeous suite of security tools. (via Kyle Young)
  3. Terraa simple, statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management […] designed from the beginning to interoperate with Lua. Terra functions are first-class Lua values created using the terra keyword. When needed they are JIT-compiled to machine code. (via Hacker News)
  4. Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora (PLOSone) — The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus.
Four short links: 20 August 2010

Four short links: 20 August 2010

Case Study, Promise Transparency, Scriptable Browsing, Open Science Data Success

  1. Case Study: Slideshare Goes Freemium (Startup Lessons Learned) — I love case studies, they’re the best part of every business degree. The MVPs were tricky to implement for emotional reasons, too. Because the SlideShare team was used to giving away a high-value product, engineers balked at charging for a clearly imperfect product. The analytics package, for instance, launched in what Sinha calls “a very crude version; we started off and sold it before we were comfortable with it.”
  2. Guardian’s Pledge Tracker — keeping track of the pledges and promises from the new UK government. (via niemanlab)
  3. luakit browser framework — script WebKit using Lua. (via ivanristic)
  4. Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimers (New York Times) — The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.
Four short links: 9 October 2009

Four short links: 9 October 2009

Negative Karma, Wal-Mart TQI, Idiot Airlines, and Native iPhone Apps in Lua

  1. Don’t Display Negative Karma — A fascinating insight for those building social software, whether for collective intelligence or otherwise: There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user’s abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma-to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars-you’ll see that most haven’t sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they’re now doing business under different account names. (I love finding articles like this, thinking “they should write a book for us!” and then realizing “oh, they already are!”) (via Hacker News)
  2. Information Wants to be Free, Even At Wal-Mart (Pete Warden) — an interesting piece on the value of opening up data, sharing information in negotiations so the best outcome can be reached. I’d argue that this trust argument is usually a cop-out, hiding worries about turf and control. In most cases it’s clear that it’s not in the other party’s best interest to screw you over, and if it is, why are you dealing with them at all? The worst cases I saw were between departments within the same company, often we shared more information with competitors than the guys down the hall. The other reason I see people not sharing is shame: many companies (and individuals) work hard to present a facade of competence and quality that facts belie.
  3. The Forest, The Trees, and the Bag FeesThe bean counters can’t track the revenue dilution of all these new fees. They don’t want to. We miss the forest for the goddamed trees all the time. And the CEO acts as if fees are found cash. Meanwhile, no one asks why our overall revenue is plunging and we’re losing money quarter after quarter. Everyone acts as if one thing has nothing to do with the other. A reminder to watch the important numbers, e.g. cash in bank, profit, customer satisfaction. (via Bryan O’Sullivan)
  4. Native iPhone Apps Written in Lua — open source port of Lua with Cocoa bindings for the iPhone. This is a tutorial showing you how to install and get past Hello, World. Apple have already approved one app written using it.
Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

  1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming — Adrian Holovaty’s project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that’s about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he’s inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
  2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites — Leonard Lin lays out what’s required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the ‘Rails killer’ if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
  3. Academic Earth — takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
  4. Love2D — a Lua-based 2D game engine. I’m looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.