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Showing posts from March, 2017

Faster horses

This is the problem with gossip . Lack of a web of trust signature scheme  or a CRC  allows information distortion at each hop. Stemming from the clever analogy in 1999: "if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they’d probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse." many people nowadays tell the story as if Ford really said that. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.99d_asked_people_what_they_wanted.2C_they_would_have_asked_for_a_better_horse.22 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/

Sticky note - almost thrown away bad glue, reused by accident

I heard somebody starting to spread the rumor that sticky note was invented by accident. The anecdote went on to say that they'd first invented a bad glue, almost threw it away, but then found a use for it after somebody accidentally applied it on the back side of a small piece of paper. This is plain simply false . This invention has seen an exhaustive proof of concept phase by an individual, being demoed in a trade show, and then being blatantly copied and entering mass production after a slow and difficult start. [Alan]  Amron said his idea in 1973 came about with chewing gum. He was looking for a way to stick a note on his refrigerator for his wife and used gum, providing inspiration for the adhesive he would use on his Press-on Memo. That year he took the sticky notes to a New York trade show and met briefly with two 3M executives, Amron said, but nothing came of the meeting. Fry and Silver [from 3M] came up with what 3M originally called the Press ‘n’ Peel memo pad in 19

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game

= The Computer Language Benchmarks Game The Computer Language Benchmarks Game is a free software project for comparing how a given subset of simple algorithms can be implemented in various popular programming languages. The project consists of: * A set of very simple algorithmic problems * Various implementations to the above problems in various programming languages * A set of unit tests to verify that the submitted implementations solve the problem statement * A framework for running and timing the implementations * A website to facilitate the interactive comparison of the results = Supported languages Due to resource constraints, only a small subset of common programming languages are supported, up to the discretion of the game's operator. https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ * Ada * C * Chapel * Clojure * C# * C++ * Dart * Erlang * F# * Fortran * Go * Hack * Haskell * Java * JavaScript * Lisp * Lua * OCaml * Pascal * Perl * PHP * Python