Alexander Williams

“According to Kaspersky Lab’s Viruslist diary, this week Twitter has hosted an attack that is targeting both Twitter users and the Internet community at large. A malicious Twitter profile with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’, has a more...

“The cluster statistics were: * 910 nodes * 4 dual core Xeons @ 2.0ghz per a node * 4 SATA disks per a node * 8G RAM per a node” Reproducing the result yourself on Amazon EC2/S3 = ~ $100k

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Here’s why radix tries are cool: Search performance varies with the key size. More importantly, radix tries give you lexicographic matching.

We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather more...

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them.