My “first” computer at home was a Burroughs B80. My Dad bought it for his accounting business in the late 70s. It was about the size of two dishwashers, had an 8in floppy, a built in printer and a small flatscreen display (orange on black characters) on a swing arm above the keyboard.
I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.
All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.
Back when I was in University, we had an Amdahl mainframe with Unix running under VM. The directory structure included an awful lot of source code. I remember porting source for lex and yacc to my PC-XT running Borland's Turbo C. I assume it was licensed to Universities and source was included under an educational clause, though I'm not exactly sure.
I wonder which version of unix I was using. This would have been around December of '87.
I wrote a language called T for Bell Northern Research, not knowing there was already another T language based on Scheme. The language was used for black box testing testing of terminal interfaces, and so needed good string handling.
One aspect of the language was that Unix regular expressions were a built-in type, and so were associate arrays. These two features worked together in a cool way:
I am a Canadian, so I neither have a say, or really can comment on American politics.
This Saturday, my two daughters (ages 11 and 8) are driving a 1,700km journey to North Dakota to show our support for the #NoDAPL movement. I am doing it because my eldest is really into Aboriginal rights right now. These people are just trying to preserve their land.
Leonard's music had an uncanny sense of timing, both musical and cultural. He referenced the external, political world, indirectly - not through selfishly inward bullshit, like many of his contemporaries, but by sifting it through relationships with others and his relationship to the divine.
As I am writing this, the next article in hackernews is about Peter Thiel and his ascension to whatever office he is seeking in Trump's cabinet. His views on the damage women and minorities have done to Libertarianism (whatever that is), and how democracy is shit are well known, and I will let you judge how Palantir has benefited humanity.
The thing that gets me is his straight faced desire for immortality. Note that he doesn't wish for immortality for someone who is great, he wishes it for himself.
Prefix notation (ie. + 1 1) instead of infix notation (ie. 1 + 1) is much easier parse, as there are no precedence rules and you don't require different conventions for expressions and function calls.
The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.
My interests in C, compilers, small computers and Unix at the time wasn't driven by career aspirations. I was just genuinely interested those things. Maybe I was "unemployable".
I am an anglo who speaks french (like an anglo) and don't think I have amused my Quebecois friends more than when I used 'tabernouche' in a conversation.
It's a bit of a pro-tip for anglos - you can sound a bit crass going full-on tabernak calise etc., but droping the 'tabernouche' with anglo accent wins every time.
Our mission is to advance the end-user's interests in an increasingly adtech dominated web. We have positions open for adventurous engineers with demonstrable skills and experience.
It is true that one of the motivations is to diversify our revenue stream; almost all of our revenue comes from our Search (advertising) deal with Yahoo.
The real reason we are doing it is because modern digital advertising sucks, and we are going to change how it works.
The current ad-tech 'environment' invades your privacy, robs publishers, and delivers deplorable performance for the brand. The only winner right now is the middle-men; the 'programmatic' exchanges and the various money siphons that trade your personal data.
We want to fix that. We are starting by building an ad targeting mechanism in the browser that you can easily control and that doesn't leak your data. Currently, ads will be shown only on the Newtab page, though one could imagine a generalized future version of this capability opened up to all internet publishers.
We designed Suggested Tiles to respect user privacy. Instead of centrally collecting as much data about as many people as possible (the strategy of all other ad-tech companies), we distribute all possible ads to all users and let Firefox decide what to show. This prevents your data "leaking", while showing you relevant advertising that you can control.
The user interface is designed to help you understand why you are seeing the ad, and to allow you to easily and permanently disable this type of advertising from your experience.
Our goal is to provide effective, relevant advertising without sacrificing user privacy.
For those interested in the transparency of this, all of the server-side software for this is on github:
You may have failed, Wattage, but you certainly left the place in better shape than you found it!
In a time where a good portion of the industry is helping us click on ads that we would rather not see, you attempted something difficult, different, and with less money than most VC backed start-ups spend on their espresso machine.
Note that intersections using HLLs don't work in general. The error rates become gigantic for sets that have small intersections, or whose cardinality differs greatly.
A general solution to cardinality estimations for intersections is to just use HLLs for union operations, and keep a MinHash sketch for each key as well to perform intersections.
I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.
All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.