t1m

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.

I wonder which version of unix I was using. This would have been around December of '87.

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:

  x['hi there'] = 5
  x['hello'] = 2

  # regular expressions are enclosed in `backquotes`
  x[`hell.`] == [2]
  x[`h.*`] == [5, 2]

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.

I hope we don't get shot by Peter Thiel.

Thiel believes that women and minorities have damaged democracy and openly questions whether they should be allowed to vote.

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.

RIP Leonard. You already are immortal.

"You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed.

"I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers".

When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "microprocessors will never be used for anything but toys. Take COBOL!"

Since then, I have made a point of not even looking at COBOL code. I have been in the presence of COBOL, but have averted my eyes.

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.

Some things we are working on:

* our new Firefox `about:newtab` page - (JS, Service Worker API)

* data engineering at scale (Python, stream processing, various dbs, data visualization)

* Content Management web applications (Python APIs, JS/React front-end)

* privacy research, privacy engineering, privacy protection

* user personalization research and engineering

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.

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.

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:

https://github.com/mozilla/splice https://github.com/mozilla/onyx https://github.com/mozilla/infernyx

And tracked openly on Bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Content%20S...

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.

I am looking forward to your next venture.

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.

There is a very good analysis of this technique over at http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2013/07/10/hll-minhash.html