colin_mccabe

13 ms·

61.
Closing the diesel divide [pdf](greenhoustontx.gov)
2 points by colin_mccabe 10y ago|0 comments
62.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
At least in California, we don't use it because brick buildings crumble in earthquakes. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-quake-safety-tho... In new construction, you can use it as a facade, but n
63.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
Big data systems aren't about squeezing every drop of performance out of the hardware. They're about being able to scale your solution up effortlessly. Having a uniform programming model so that you don't have to rewrite yo
64.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
Java's concurrency story is weak overall. Nearly all code still uses the old-style "synchronized" blocks, rather than ReentrantLock. This shouldn't be a big surprise, considering that ReentrantLock was only introduced
65.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
Those aren't common mistakes, just things he dislikes about the language. For example, I don't care whether := sometimes does not introduce a new variable (have never had a bug related to that). I don't find the closure sem
66.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
Thanks for the clarification. Do the new C++ standards explicitly discuss this anywhere?
67.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
LLVM is a very impressive compiler. I'm really impressed with the warning messages it's able to produce (especially compared with what was available even 2 or 3 years ago). What is more frustrating about modern compilers (and thi
68.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
UNIX has "a standard way to deal with the file durability problem." If you fsync the file, then fsync the containing directory, that should be durable on all properly behaved setups. Of course this comes with a lot of footnotes.
69.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
I don't think this is an "ill-considered comment" at all. Daniel J. Bernstein made the same comment in his slides about "the slow death of the optimizing compiler"[ https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.0
70.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
C99 Techincal Corrigendum 3 clarifies that union-based type punning is valid by amending 6.5.2.3 with this footnote: If the member used to access the contents of a union object is not the same as the member last used to store a value in the
71.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
A lot of real-world projects turn off strict aliasing, such as the Linux kernel. It is just too difficult to think about every possible issue that could happen when doing a typecast. Autovectorization doesn't tend to work well anyway
72.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
The UNIX Hater's handbook was written a long time ago. At least on Linux, rm -rf / does not work unless you also pass --no-preserve-root.
73.
by colin_mccabe 10y ago
I wrote some big things in Go and didn't find the lack of generics particularly problematic. Different languages are good for different things-- Go is good for building things that are relatively concrete. For something like a symbol
74.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I have used both Eclipse and Intellij for building Hadoop, and neither could get incremental compilation under 30 seconds. In fact, it was often much more than that. Eclipse was a huge pain to use with Hadoop because it was always getting
75.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
The intention behind debating guilt only at the first trial is to prevent endless retrials for the same thing. Imagine if you were cleared of a charge but someone kept re-accusing you over and over, dragging you back to trial again and aga
76.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I don't agree that 2 million lines of code is "going to take a few minutes to compile no matter what [compiled] language it's written in." Based on my experiences with Go so far, I believe Go could get that significantl
77.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I agree that the Java compiler itself runs fast, but many of the surrounding tools in the Java ecosystem are not fast. For example, Maven takes several minutes to rebuild Hadoop. Based on my experiences, neither Gradle nor ant are that mu
78.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Luckily, "git" is already a derogatory term, so any misspelling would just make it less derogatory.
79.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Airplanes are not "insanely efficient" when it comes to greenhouse gasses. A plane emits roughly the same amount of greenhouse gasses per mile per person as a car. Maybe 50% if we assume an efficient plane and an inefficient car
80.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Course, then there are cases like the leaded gasoline that should be considered one of the greatest crimes of all time. Yep, and it's still going on. Some small planes still use leaded fuels. http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov&#x2
81.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
It used to be that we got all Hetch Hetchy water in the south bay. Since the California drought hit, they have started getting creative with where they pull water from. Some homebrewers that I talk to say that the water chemistry changes
82.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
It's not a Linux issue. People almost always install the Oracle JVM themselves rather than using a package manager (it's a long story...) The desire for a single JVM comes partly from the architecture of Hadoop itself. Hadoop is
83.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Well, I can only say that your experience is different than mine. I worked with C++ for 10 years, on mostly server side software, and never encountered a problem that we traced back to heap fragmentation. I'm not sure exactly why thi
84.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
The difference is that you can upgrade each Go application to Go 1.6 separately, whereas with Java, once you upgrade the JVM, all of your applications get upgraded at once. While you could technically have two different JVMs installed side
85.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
While I agree that compaction is desirable in theory, empirically it's not really necessary. For example, there are no C/C++ malloc/free implementations that compact, because compaction would change the address of pointers,
86.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
While I agree that Java has been one of the most stable and backwards-compatible languages out there (especially compared to things like Scala, which regularly breaks source and binary backwards compat), there are still rough edges. I am n
87.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
There are a large number of people who do kernel-level integration work-- configuring things, downloading drivers, setting things up, and otherwise dealing with the hardware. This kind of work isn't the most glamorous, but it definite
88.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
The desktop computer market is a pretty small part of the overall kernel developer market. Embedded systems is by far the biggest employer. There are just many more phones and other devices out there than PCs-- a trend that seems set to c
89.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
sparse -- adds annotations to kernel code which can be checked by the compiler. It is a little bit like a parallel type system which provides domain-specific knowledge like "this function takes lock A and then lock B" or "
90.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I think it would be helpful if there were a way for users to tell the smartphone browser to reflow text to fit the viewport size. As it is, we're stuck looking at some very tiny text when people choose wide page sizes. That is one re

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