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  How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don't often capture the headlines--but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under cert...

   FFT,Speed-up,Fast fourier transform     2012-03-20 07:47:04

  Why Dynamic Programming Languages Are Slow

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that. In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it. The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance. T...

   Dynamic language,Slow,Analysis     2012-03-26 15:33:11

  Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers?

Summary: Mark Shuttleworth says yes, Ubuntu is now competitive with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the enterprise space. Since last summer, Ubuntu has been more popular than Red Hat as a Web server. When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the c...

   Linux,Ubuntu,Daat center,Server     2012-04-15 01:22:53

  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  Best practices of front end optimization

1. Use DocumentFragment or innerHTML to replace complex elements insertion DOM operation on browser is expensive. Although browser performance is improved much, multiple DOM elements insertion is still expensive and will affect the page load speed. Assume we have an ul element on our page, we now want to retrieve a JSON list using AJAX and then update the ul using JavaScript. Usually we may write it as : var list = document.querySelector('ul'); ajaxResult.items.forEach(function(item) { // ...

   JavaScript,Front end,Optimization,Tips     2013-07-06 11:26:27

  Hey kids, just say NO to programming !

Cory Doctorow's latest talk 'The Coming War on General Purpose Computing' really puts things in perspective about life in the 21st century. This got me thinking more about functional programming languages and how they are related to the intentional limitation/crippling of turing machines by industry and government. What if Stallman is right about the intentional efforts to limit freedom of information ? What if it's even worse than we all think it is ? In relation to functional languages ...

   Programming,Factor,View,Kids,No     2012-01-16 10:16:19

  #46 – Why software sucks

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. The three things that make it difficult are: Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of...

   Software design,Sucks,Software industry     2012-03-19 13:10:37

  12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know?Caffeine â€“ You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. M...

   Tips,Programmer,How,What,Logic     2011-08-31 08:46:32

  I'm Retiring from PHP

I am retiring from PHP as my language of choice for personal side projects and new programming ventures. This was not an easy decision to come to, but one that I think is necessary for my love of programming to continue. You see, I'm not only a programmer because I love programming, but because I can not do anything else. History It all started in 1999 when I was in 8th grade. The Internet was really starting to get interesting and I wanted to start programming. I had picked up...

   PHP,Scala,Programming,Language     2011-06-27 07:36:25

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02