Interesting Snippets from 2012-03-27

• Data Mining Isn't A Good Bet - WSJ.com

  The stock market generates such vast quantities of information that, if you plow through enough of it for long enough, you can always find some relationship that appears to generate spectacular returns -- by coincidence alone. This sham is known as "data mining."

• Beginner's Guide to Linkers

  This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to include more information on the pecularities of linking on Windows, plus some clarification on the one definition rule.]

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-03-25

• Factual’s Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe - NYTimes.com

  Factual’s plan, outlined in a big orange room with a few tables and walled with whiteboards, is to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds. The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs. Factual, which now has 50 employees, could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.

  FACTUAL sells data to corporations and independent software developers on a sliding scale, based on how much the information is used. Small data feeds for things like prototypes are free; contracts with its biggest customers run into the millions. Sometimes, Factual trades data with other companies, building its resources.

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