Yesterday, I shared an anecdote involving a school I once attended with a list. This anecdote eventually became the basis for a blog post. Traffic was fairly normal for the first few hours until it found its way onto hackernews.Then it exploded.The comments on both the original blog post and the post on hackernews filled almost immediately with opinionated hackers, teachers and students sharing similar experiences, discussing the problem and figuring out what should be done about it.Repeatedly, the argument was made that the education system is smothering creativity, actively discouraging...

We've been experimenting with app prices for quite some time and again and again we've noticed a funny effect:No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue.I attached two charts to illustrate that. I recently lowered the price of the iPad app (http://bit.ly/92xWv1) from 5 to 1 Dollars. At first the sales spike, then they even out to previous levels. Meaning: By cutting the price by factor 5, I am selling exactly 5 x more apps. Then we lowered the price of iA Writer for Mac (http://bit.ly/jfsHdZ) from 10 to 5 Dollars. And the exact same thing happened. There was a short i...

Machine learning algorithms have a much better chance of being widely adopted if they are implemented in some easy-to-use code. There are several important concerns associated with machine learning which stress programming languages on the ease-of-use vs. speed frontier.Speed The rate at which data sources are growing seems to be outstripping the rate at which computational power is growing, so it is important that we be able to eak out every bit of computational power. Garbage collected languages (java, ocaml, perl and python) often have several issues here.Garbage co...

Most people take “Build something people want” to mean “Pick a problem to solve and solve it well.” This is not sufficient to build a world changing company.“Why now?” is the question entrepreneurs really need to answer. “Why now” encompasses two important and closely related concepts:Why have previous attempts at this idea failed?What enabling factors have emerged that enable you to succeed today?The world is full of smart people who have the same ideaThere are a lot of smart people out there. At least five of them have already tried to solve th...

I thought the prospect of quad-core tablet computers was exciting.Then I saw Intel's latest -- a 1 teraflop chip, with more than 50 cores, that Intel unveiled today, running it on a test machine at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle.That means my kids may take a teraflop laptop to college -- if their grades don't suffer too much having access to 50-core video game consoles.It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performance. That was in 1997, on a system with 9,298 Pentium II chips that filled 72 computing cabinets.Now ...

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but it may not vary so much within a given company. Someone who is 10x more productive than his colleag...

You might not know it, but a key cog in the global innovation machine is hiding in plain sight in the world's largest democracyReutersFor many firms, developing new products for consumers around the world is the most visible manifestation of innovation - the "real deal." But many people still see India as a place where other people's ideas are made or executed and not where innovation begins. (After all, you don't hear about an Indian equivalent to Google, iPod or Viagra.) Bu they're wrong. In more than 600 captive research and development (R&D) centers across India today, corporations are...

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that length. Since all the interior objects have the same size, fragmentation is eliminated. The only rea...