randliu

It took me until the 7th paragraph to realize this wasn't a competitor to Ashley Madison.

The name of this article is really unfortunate and will probably mislead many readers.

>database systems

No, it's not ready to replace SQL, and I don't think it ever will. What are your requirements? If it's horizontal scalability (and you're actually hitting a performance wall) you should begin to think about it. Maybe also if you never do any joins.

Relational database systems (+ normalization) compromise everything to ensure the ACID properties, which for the majority of cases, is the most important part.

I'd suggest Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321... , it's more readable than either CLRS or Dasgupta/Papadimitriou/Vazirani.

I've been looking at buying a folder, and the main draw to the Brompton is the size of the folded bike. The minimum price is about $1000 though, and the cheaper folding bikes, usually American or Taiwanese brands, only fold in the middle so are not nearly as portable. I looked around for a cheaper bike with the same fold as the Brompton, and found one made by a company called Flamingo Bikes, but haven't been able to find a source: http://www.flamingobike.com/products/products_show.php?pid=5... .

The unique location is the big plus, especially considering that the absence of geostationary satellites over the poles means this is likely the ONLY developer job on the planet that can't be done offsite, until they run fiber to Antarctica.

> The successful candidate will need to be physically qualified and willing to work at Polar and high altitude sites during the Austral Summer.

It's a jocular reference to the piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst.

Happy holidays!

He's spoken before at a conference at Harvard, and at least had some things interesting to say. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E_bYRZT5-E (part 1)

Don't ask him how to make money though

We can't afford a single skyscraper collapse, but we can usually afford to use bad software.

The article sounds like Dijkstra in 1988. My bet is another 22 years won't change anything.

I'm just saying that all the author is observing is that the students with the most to lose, work the hardest. Foreign students obviously have a lot to lose since they're coming overseas for an education. On the other hand, the American students she interacts with are likely wealthy and don't necessarily need stellar grades to move on to a professional degree program e.g. medical school.

It doesn't explain any difference between American and other students, just that Babson's student body is different than most.

From personal experience i've found the hardest working students to be those needing to get into professional school (law or medicine) as well as low-income/disadvantaged students who couldn't afford the $50k tuition/year to attend a private college.

Also keep in mind that the author teaches at Babson, which is a private college devoted entirely to business administration students.

There's several companies working on sentiment analysis. The NYT had a roundup: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emot...

Backtype is a YC company that probably does some NLP stuff on the backend. http://www.backtype.com/

Also, Powerset and Wolfram Alpha.

The most obvious killer app is sentiment analysis applied to product reviews. Overall I don't feel like NLP has game-changing applications yet since good data is structured data. The research is in place, though.

Computer Modern.

Since you're in the bay area, you should look into regional meetups for people learning/using rails. There's one at Berkeley the third Tuesday of each month (Nov 17 this month)

http://ruby.meetup.com/81/