2 ms·

See slide 6 of this IBM presentation http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-Stoodley-talks/UofAKASWideAudience.pdf http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-

See slide 6 of this IBM presentation http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-Stoodley-talks/UofAKASWideAudience.pdf http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-Stoodley-talks/Uof... (warning: pdf). Note how little compilers cost relative to other ways of improving performance. You are still thinking "cathedral" as the project structure. I think "bazaar" is a better approach - try all the things, fling stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Use the terabytes of existing code to learn. I see the latter like spoken language translation. The approach used to be coming up with rules from experts which is very expensive. Nowadays they use statistical approaches which relies on having lots of data, uses humungous amounts of machine time to build the translation, but uses very few (expensive) people. A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in the long run.

rogerbinns 15y ago
Another example from a favoured database - MongoDB. Rather than trying to come up with optimal query plans they try all pertinent ones concurrently. Whichever finishes first is noted and used in the future. Its performance results continue to be monitored and if they start diverging all are tried again. This means not having to guess big O correctly, or access patterns or other stuff in advance. It is possible to add future optimisations and not worry about current ones since they just won't be used work inapplicable workloads.
eli_gottlieb 15y ago
>A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in the long run. Then what's the point of a YC startup? Doesn't have to make a profit, doesn't have to build a product... basically, sounds like it doesn't have to build a company.

rogerbinns 15y ago

Another example from a favoured database - MongoDB. Rather than trying to come up with optimal query plans they try all pertinent ones concurrently. Whichever finishes first is noted and used in the future. Its performance results continue to be monitored and if they start diverging all are tried again. This means not having to guess big O correctly, or access patterns or other stuff in advance. It is possible to add future optimisations and not worry about current ones since they just won't be used work inapplicable workloads.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

>A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in the long run. Then what's the point of a YC startup? Doesn't have to make a profit, doesn't have to build a product... basically, sounds like it doesn't have to build a company.