Diego Basch, a software engineer, writes about tech, startups, social network statistics, and occasionally data on politics and society.
HN links it for his social media usage numbers, such as the 42% Facebook figure, and his gun ownership and homicide chart, which drew debate over method.
> Comments: The 32 bit limit is noted (perhaps it should be a warning) on the download page but the main problem was the author did not know when writes started to fail. MongoDB uses unsafe writes by default in the sense that from the driver, you do not know if the write has succeeded without a further call to getLastError. This is because one of the often cited use cases for MongoDB is fast writes, which is achieved by fire and forget queries.
(in reference to I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try. In Ten Years, http://diegobasch.com/ill-give-mongodb-another-try-in-ten-years)
I read the referred article and the HN discussion...but wasn't quite able to tell how much of the debate was focused on the reasonability of this default rather than "developers should read the docs, or accept catastrophic failure" attitude (which is not inherently wrong).
What immediately comes to mind is the Rails ActiveRecord update_attributes vulnerability...the default was to allow the updating of all specified attributes with the assumption that no competent developer would trust unsanitized input from the browser. After a good Samaritan performed a spectacular hack on Github, the Rails team immediately changed the default.
Is that the situation here with the 32-bit silent fail default? That it is a sensible default, but could be changed if it's shown that competent devs will nonetheless screw it up?
I don't see DDG taking Google's search crown. But it could happen the way Firefox opened the barn door - then other browsers came to take the crown (Chrome, for example).
[1] indicates DDG uses third-party APIs for deep web searches. To me that sounds like how Inktomi was a "search engine API" and neither Inktomi nor Yahoo saw Google coming [2].
Even if DDG doesn't succeed, Google is now at the top of the hill and therefore is _the_ target for all competitors.
[1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources
[2] http://diegobasch.com/a-relevant-tale-how-google-killed-inktomi and HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3924609
I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool.
A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly
--
PS. I can relate to the author's complaint: "on Twitter I can find the stuff I’m interested in. On Facebook I can only see the stuff other people are interested in." Very true!
True, but a common argument from gun owners is that if you're feeling homicidal, you'll find a way to commit murder with or without a gun.
Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership
(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
Even before clicking on the story, I knew there would be a "gun-related homicide" vs. "gun ownership" graph, and not an "all homicide" vs. "gun ownership" graph. Do we want to minimize all homicide, or only gun homicide, and don't care about people killed by other means? (It goes without saying that any human right that increases homicide rate should be abolished /s)
The missing data: https://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership
And more on typical data manipulation in gun debates: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between
link at the top...
"life the universe and technical interviews" http://diegobasch.com/life-the-universe-and-technical-interviews.
Every solution has a loop 1 to 1000000 which is N but then they check every digit which is a log N making them N log N solutions. But there are Log N solutions that avoid checking every possibility.
Ex:
s dup if 10 /mod recurse + then ; : f 0 1000000 0 do i s 42 = if 1 + then loop ;