davidst

41 ms·

211.
by davidst 16y ago
Sometimes our fears can get the best of us. This is one of those times.
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by davidst 16y ago
Where to begin? I'll pick one of my favorite mistakes: Cleverly avoiding a market that was ripe for the taking. In the early/mid 90s I built a compressor called Quantum that outperformed PKZip by an average of 20% to 30%. For a few years
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by davidst 16y ago
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread. -- Alexander Pope I've come to believe that people who create startups must be, by definition, entirely unqualified for the job. If they were truly qualified they would have some idea of what t
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by davidst 16y ago
I rode a motorcycle across Russia and several of the former Soviet republics eight years ago. You can't help but learn many useful hacks along the way. Here's one: How to deal with the police. Their work is boring and it's not unusual for
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by davidst 16y ago
One way that I've found useful is to ask the question, "How many bits do you need to represent an integer counter from 0 to 999?" They answer, "10 bits." "How many base 10 digits do you have in the counter?" "Three." "How many bits did you
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by davidst 16y ago
This is true. Instead of "one machine == one person" we could adopt "one virtual machine == one person" or even "one virtual machine == one app". It's too much to ask mainstream users to understand how to do this but it's not too much to
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by davidst 16y ago
Longfellow put it well: "The heights of great men reached and kept, were not obtained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."
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by davidst 16y ago
The most important question you both need to answer is which is more important: Friendship or the business? If it's friendship then don't involve lawyers (that will almost certainly end it) and find a way to part under terms such that you c
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by davidst 16y ago
Cool, thanks! Too bad there's not a Windows version, though.
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by davidst 16y ago
Imagine a tool that would take the output of a profiler and render an interactive graphic like this for both: (A) data structure sizes and (B) run-time performance. That would be incredibly useful.
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by davidst 16y ago
> Isn't the last part of the Cuckoo hashing paper the > part that documents it as slight less good compared > to existing algorithms? No, Cuckoo hashing is a trade of a little run-time performance for better memory utilization.
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by davidst 16y ago
I think you're missing the point. The article does not claim that Huffman coding was superseded by dictionary methods. It does not confuse statistical modelling with encoding.
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by davidst 16y ago
Computer science gives us a better opportunity to test ideas than, say, particle physics. The ability to experiment so easily is a major part of the appeal for many of us. > Even the stereotypical "impractical" research algorithms &#62
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by davidst 16y ago
It's more the rule than the exception when research is done on ideas that at the time of publication are impractical to manifest as a working machine or program. To pick just one (possibly the most well known) example: Einstein's paper on
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The Lost Quarter-Century in Data Compression(blog.podly.tv)
87 points by davidst 16y ago|14 comments
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by davidst 16y ago
BTW, as you desire to decrease your error rate Cuckoo hashing starts to become an attractive alternative to Bloom filters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_hashing http://www.ru.is/faculty/ulfar/CuckooHash.pdf You can get your hash t
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by davidst 16y ago
How important is it that you get every unique line? Is it ok for some small percentage of unique lines to not appear in the output? How much memory do you have available? The Bloom filter is a good way to go. Here is one possibility: If y
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by davidst 17y ago
Simple advice: Read the classics. Study successful investors. Study failures too! Good advice: There is no substitute for investing with your own money. Investment simulators are absolutely to be avoided. Hard truth: It will take years but