Category: Computers
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TIL: Elasticsearch timeouts
Lately at work at Tumblr I have been working on creating feeds of posts based on the country in which they were published, or the country in which users liked or reblogged a post. I didn’t want to do a simple filter, but rather use a boosting query to boost localized content, while also accounting…
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UNIX tip of the day: readlink
Today I found myself using the readlink command, and it occurred to me that many people might not be aware of it. Here is what the man page says it does readlink – print resolved symbolic links or canonical file names If you work on shared filesystems with other people, such as on a large…
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MacOS tip of the day: Dictionary
If you’re like me, you find yourself looking up words in the dictionary fairly frequently. For me, this is particularly true, since I am an American living in Germany, and even though I speak German quite well, there are few days that go by where I don’t need to look up a word or two.…
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UNIX tip of the day: pushd
I am frequently surprised by the number of colleagues I have who do not know about the BASH builtins pushd and popd. I myself remember seeing them for the first time in a script about 10 years ago, and had to look up the commands. At first I didn’t quite understand the point, but now…
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What is a professor?
Yesterday at dinner my 12-year old son asked me if I used to be a professor. “No, I didn’t.” But I did teach at a university, right? “Yes, I did.” And thus began a 20 minute explanation of what it is to be a professor. I thought I would summarize it up here, since it…