Alex Ko (alexko)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

I am interested in FreeBSD,Linux,Cats,Programming,C++,Friendship,Web Design,Perl,San Francisco,People,Life,Simplicity,Artificial Intelligence,Science,Freedom,Technology,Creativity,Learning,Stars,Discovering,Economics,Nature,Knowledge,Stumbleupon,Evolution,Green Tea,Networking,Culture,Artificial Life,P2P,Imagination,Curiosity,Open Minded People,Web Development,Engineering,Wikipedia,Memetics,People That Don't Take Themselves Too Seriously,Research,DIY,Firefox,Interface Design,Thought,Social Networking,Fractals,Social Software,Knowledge Management,Ecology,E-democracy,Collective Intelligence,Networked Knowledge Diffusion,Web Sociology,Collaborative Knowledge Sharing,Innovative Technology,Creating Abstract Images on PC,Wiki,Socially Responsible Business,Nonconformism,Connectionism,Opportunity,Exchange of Ideas. My favorite music are 張雨生,熊天平,F.I.R.,Yoshida Brothers,Kiroro,HY,Utada Hikaru,Sarah McLachlan,Celine Dion,Rick Astley,Depeche Mode. Books: The Blind Watchmaker,1984,Count of Monte Cristo,Tao Te Ching,The Selfish Gene,The Master and Margarita,The Art of Electronics,The Lost World,I Ching,The Heart of a Dog,The Mysterious Island,The Wisdom of Crowds,Creativity in Business,Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Member since Jul 26, 2006, follows 11 people, 8 public groups, 4308 public bookmarks (4510 total).

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Recent Tags:	psychology(0), entrepreneurship(0), self-improvement(0), collective-intelligence(0), philosophy(0), social-media(0), human-based-computation(0), creativity(0), performance(0), mit(0), database(0), people(0), cci(0), decision-making(0), education(0), hardware(0)
Top Tags:	stumblers(273), webdesign(127), collective-intelligence(120), blog(77), tools(60), wikipedia(58), people(57), knowledge-markets(66), collaborative-filtering(52), evolutionary-computation(47)

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Recent Bookmarks and Annotations

Roy Croft quotes about 7 hours ago
Map-reduce, Hadoop and Clouds - When and When Not (aBlog) about 14 hours ago
- In this article, I want to focus on two specific cool
  technologies that frequently go hand-in-hand: Google's Map-reduce
  (e.g. Hadoop), and Cloud Computing (e.g. EC2). For whatever
  reasons possibly including those I've mentioned above, temptation is high among
  many engineers today to use these sledge hammers to crack nuts.
- as it turns out,
  our problem is very different in scale from,
  say, computing ranks on every document on the web. In fact, our graph
  is small by comparison, and we can afford to do most of our
  calculations on this graph in memory and in real-time. We
  are often able to get away with efficiently processing, within each of
  many simultaneous threads, the edges of any particular node in
  sequence. To be sure, one can indeed Hadoop this process by clever
  definitions of functions that will do the kind of recursive
  aggregation for the quantities that interest us. But we want to see
  if it is necessary at all, and for the foreseeable future at least.
- 1 more annotations...
- - Map-reduce is an
    optimization technique that buys efficiency using a clever
    divide-and-conquer approach. But to know what to divide, and how, and
    whether at all, one needs to first measure, estimate and calculate
    using tried and trusted techniques. Most of the time, a bigger home is
    not the right answer to clutter in a small one. An engineer who cannot
    write efficient code on a single computer most likely won't be able to
    write efficient code in the cloud. Only, it will be much harder to
    tell. And so in summary, let me leave you with these parting thoughts
    - One must first learn to walk properly on the ground before
    trying to fly in the clouds.
Summation: Common Traits of A-Players on 2009-11-19
- Going to a great school – or even going to college at all – is not a good predictor of being an A-Player.
- As a hiring manager, your goal is to fill each position with the very best person in that position.
- 6 more annotations...
- - Great people are consistently finding ways to be great.
  - A-Players like to be creative. Actually, they NEED to be creative. They need to find the best way to accomplish their goals and they cannot be told exactly what to do. (B and C players often NEED to be told what to do). And so an A-Player would generally quit rather than follow stupid rules
  - i
    f you are an entrepreneur of a fast-growing company, you should monitor people that like to create rules for others (generally the general counsel and the HR people). While those rules are often well-intentioned, they can drive A-Players away from the company.
  - A-Players have often founded something. Maybe they started a student club, an association, a company, a cool web page, a user group, a neighborhood watch association, or a new committee on the PTA.
  - A-Players seem to better understand how to manage people
  - They both have some incredible natural talents – but it is their work ethic that sets them apart.
Andrew Patton: Modeling the Markets on 2009-11-19
- “For instance, it is well known that a given bundle of stocks often decline in value together, but those very same stocks rarely increase in value together,” he said. “In other words, there’s something very different going on in a bear market than in a bull market, and my research tries to capture that difference.”
- “What’s intriguing is that our notion of volatility changes,” he said. “A two percent shift in asset prices in one era -- say, the mid-1990s -- may hardly be news at all, when that same shift may make headlines four or five years later.”
Apple's Mistake on 2009-11-19
- They work on something till they think it's finished,
  then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because
  software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
- Programmers don't use
  launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it
  yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is
  making them do bad work
- 1 more annotations...
- - How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in
    OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had
    to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
    and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?
    Alex Ko on 2009-11-19
    
    great example of a bad process
Everyman Offers New Directions in Online Maps - NYTimes.com on 2009-11-19
- Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.
- People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.
- 5 more annotations...
- - Tele Atlas, which TomTom bought last year for $4.3 billion, now uses feedback from users of TomTom’s navigation devices to update its maps.
  - can’t rely fully on community-created maps, any more than historians can rely on Wikipedia.
    Alex Ko on 2009-11-19
    
    TomTom used to wipe all the community-created corrections when they do their own update instead of evaluating them and incorporating them into their own update I wonder if they improved in this respect. Last time I used TomTom 2yrs ago
  - Defenders of the amateur approach point out that professionally created maps often have errors and can be slow to add road closures and other updates. Google has moderators who try to verify the accuracy of users’ changes, unless they are very minor, while OpenStreetMap relies on its members to police changes.
    Alex Ko on 2009-11-19
    
    Google could have used an automated way of aggregation for this purpose
  - “Seeing an error on a map is the kind of thing that gnaws at me,” he said. “By being able to fix it, I feel like the world is a better place in a very small but measurable way.”
  - Google is now preventing further changes to the region, after people in India tried to make it part of their country
The Problem with Twitter Lists on 2009-11-16
- It isn't immediately clear how to remove yourself from
  a list. The way of doing this it turns out is by blocking the list owner.
- By allowing only 1 person to curate a list
  they will never become truly authoritative.
How Experienced Developers Can Handicap a Lean Startup on 2009-11-15
- - Alex Ko on 2009-11-15
    
    Startup and research programming are really similar. In startup we learn more about customers' needs, in research we learn more about the nature or some specific phenomenon.
- Inexperienced developers have one big advantage: they haven’t been programmed to work for perfection and they’re not afriad to make mistakes.
- 5 more annotations...
- - Start-up success depends on rapidly figuring out what customers will actually buy, a process that often requires quickly hacking solutions and other bad software practices for the enterprise. Unfortunately most of us get our tech skills from the enterprise - an environment where cutting corners usually causes more long-term problems than benefits. As a profession we need better practices for lean startups
  - In startups both the solution and the problem are unknown.
  - Solving problems TRW (the right way) almost always takes longer than quickly hacking together a solution. Since real startup progress is measured in increments of customer learning, TRW is often the wrong choice when you can learn faster with a hack.
  - Much of our engineering training in established companies can handicap us in a startup.
  - Arguments like “You do/don’t need foreign keys” miss the real point
Creative class - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 2009-11-15
- The Creative Class is a class of workers whose job is to create meaningful new forms (2002). The Creative Class is composed of scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and architects. The Creative Class also “includes people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content” (Florida, 2006, p. 8).
- The Creative Class is not a class of workers among many but in reality it is the class that will bring any country who has them to great economic power and growth. The main advantage to a creative class is that it creates outcomes in new ideas, high-tech industry and regional growth. Even though the Creative Class has been around for centuries, the U.S. was the first large country to have this Creative Class that deals with information technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
- 5 more annotations...
- - for a city to become a magnet for the Creative Class, it must be an example of "the three 'T's" of Talent (have a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (have a diverse community, which has a 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (have the technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture)
  - members of the Creative Class value meritocracy, diversity and individuality and look for these characteristics when they relocate
  - Florida and others have found a strong correlation between those cities and states which provide a more tolerant atmosphere toward culturally-unconventional people such as gays, artists, and musicians (exemplified by Florida's "Gay Index" and "Bohemian Index" developed in The Rise of the Creative Class), and the numbers of Creative Class workers that live and move there (2002).
  - Creative workers are looking for cultural, social, and technological amenities/climates in which they feel they can best "be themselves".
  - small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer, or between creativity and its creators
Kids choosing ‘experiences’ over big homes, says Richard Florida | Marketer News on 2009-11-15
- This class–whose main economic product is knowledge and creative thought, which he says includes everyone from scientists to entrepreneurs–now represents approximately 75% of the spending power in North America and will drive consumer trends globally.
- Florida interprets the recent global recession as an “economic reset” taking place to account for the creative class becoming a larger percentage of the population as a whole.
- 1 more annotations...
- - Kids don’t want big houses because they realize it’s bankrupted their parents and relatives and they want to consume something new–not only goods, but experiences.

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