I've been using Hadoop a lot lately for a stealth mode project I'm working on. One of the big lessons I'm learning is that where medium to big data is concerned, data formats matter a lot. Where small filesizes are concerned, there is little harm in slinging around JSON objects …

It's becoming a more or less accepted economic theory that a large part component of our current recession is structural. This means that during the housing bubble we had lots of people in housing related jobs (construction worker, realtor ), but once the bubble burst those jobs ceased to exist, and …

I recently had a power failure, which resulting in my hadoop cluster shutting down. No matter, hadoop came back after a little while.

However, I ran into problems immediately after restarting it:

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$ hadoop fsck /
Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: \
                    Server …

I recently saw an article by Gary Taubes get posted to Hacker News. He pushes the curious thesis that conventional wisdom on obesity is somehow incorrect since it fails to explain why people choose not to put down the chips.

He begins with some straightforward calculations:

When you're in your …