Al Hoang

Wahoo! A new Paul Graham article is up on-line. Paul Graham is a local in town LISP hacker. His articles he writes are a great read on ideas about hackers and software development. One of these days I’ll get better at LISP.

His latest hacking attempts have been focusing on fighting spam as well as a new LISP dialect called Arc. I’m curious to see what Arc will turn out like. One thing I do know is that he’s biding his time and brewing Arc slowly rather than rushing to get it out the door. In my opinion this is a good thing as creating a quality product that stands the test of time requires a good amount of time.

Another “JWZ” link. Seems people are posting up fake closing signs on Starbucks.
The San Fran Gate has more info.

Jeremy Zawodny proclaims PageRank is dead. For those that don’t know. PageRank is the base algorithm that google bases its rankings on. In an algorithms class that I took we covered the original algorithm of PageRank which I thought was really cool. The idea is very neat but does use some heavy lineaer algebra and recursive calculations to shake out all of those links it discovers and create a rank.
The ensuing discussion on Jeremy’s blog got me thinking about this… I think I agree with most of the folk that PageRank is NOT dead. It’s merely evolved. I have not seen anyone come up with a better base algorithm and publish it yet.
This reminds me of when I was talking with a young geek that worked at Ximian. He proclaimed the OS wars dead. Yeah… whatever. Might as well proclaim Von Neumann architectures dead. Some things are just become fundamental building blocks that many other things are built upon. Those things only become dead when you read about them in history books and keeping those ideas alive requires more work than the usefulness they give.