jbert

34 ms·

331.
by jbert 17y ago
The basic observation is that, since all/most aspects of a system are likely to be of high or low quality, you can use the quality of any of them as s proxy metric for overall quality. Note that this fails if the proxy metric becomes popula
332.
by jbert 17y ago
If it's really the case that "no publicity is better than bad publicity", they can ditch the brand and relaunch under a different name.
333.
by jbert 17y ago
Thanks. If you have any specific comments please reply or email me (address in profile).
334.
by jbert 17y ago
> I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me.. Disclaimer: I work for http://www.humyo.com/ Humyo is not as well-known as dropbox (especially in the US) but we have a significant userbase (>500k) and are I think fai
335.
by jbert 17y ago
That's great. My initial impression of the graph is that it looked over-complex. But it was explained well. I guess you could take some shortcuts (e.g. commit hotfixes to develop and cherry-pick them into master) but the described flow is a
336.
by jbert 17y ago
I guess you could send out a unique session key with the page, have the JS run AES or similar. Wait, stop, crypotime. I'm appear to be trying to design a protocol for secret exchange. I should just go and do some reading instead. Do you kno
337.
by jbert 17y ago
Of the sites which don't send passwords in the clear, any idea how many are just obfuscating? (Xor, base64, etc).
338.
by jbert 17y ago
> When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not. But you might find tha
339.
by jbert 17y ago
So the silver bullet is to reduce the cost of failure? So that you can allow failure, which seems to be a necessary requirement for fast iteration and hence fast development? i.e. the hard thing to do is to find a way to slice off 5 or 10%
340.
by jbert 17y ago
You could handle dlopen() by: - have parent isolate process monitor a dir in the chroot env. If it sees a file appear (with no .tmp suffix) it adds any .so files which are listed in the file (one per line) then removes the file - set a LD_P
341.
by jbert 17y ago
Typo/error on page 4 (of postscript version)? ((lambda (f) (f '(b c))) '(lambda (x) (cons 'a x))) afaics, the 2nd lambda shouldn't be quoted.
342.
by jbert 17y ago
> I'd much rather a server service all requests properly than fail. Depends what you mean by "properly". If you mean "within N seconds", then when overload takes you over the point at which reqs take N seconds, all your reqs are now f
343.
by jbert 17y ago
Naively, you take N cpu-seconds to handle one request (say N=0.01). That means you can't handle more than 1/N requests/second before you start to slow down all requests. So if you don't have a bound of 1/N requests/second on your server, yo
344.
by jbert 17y ago
Sounds like an interesting way of harnessing solar power. Perhaps all future skyscrapers could be self-powering, or even day-to-day energy-positive (I imagine paying back construction energy budget might be tricky).
345.
by jbert 17y ago
Isn't the rule the degree of oversight required is importance-of-task/trustworthiness-of-person? And if you want to minimise oversight you need to avoid untrusthworty people and/or give them unimportant (but still useful) work.
346.
by jbert 17y ago
> The Problem for Poor Students Is Low Financial Aid, Not High Tuition Doing the sums after the fact discards the influences on the person making the decision at the time. If you're able to take up the place and eligible for financial a
347.
by jbert 17y ago
Thanks, I was thinking in terms of hashes (which doesn't really make sense for searching/ordering).
348.
by jbert 17y ago
> but the 95% historical data made writes slow because of the large number of indexes. Why does updating an index take more time if there are many table rows? i.e. if you have 5 indices on a table and 1 write/second, what's the differen
349.
by jbert 17y ago
The old quipu X.500 directory originally used a similar approach (load to ram at startup, writes go to ram+disk, reads+searches come from ram). You get durability and run-time performance, but there can be appreciable downtime during the st
350.
by jbert 17y ago
I think I am wrong. I now think top's 'SHR' isn't the "total amount of virtual memory shared", it's "amount of RES which is shared". (Hmm...but my test could be conflating "RES" memory with "allocated" VM (memory which is backed by somethi
351.
by jbert 17y ago
Sharing doesn't equate with resident, it equates with virtual memory. You can have a process with 1GB of vm, of which 100MB is shared with other processes but which has only 10MB resident (hmm...am I wrong? are shared pages never evicted fr
352.
by jbert 17y ago
The languages are much more similar than they are different (in terms of feature set, not mindset), but one thing perl has which I don't understand how the python+ruby people get by without is 'use strict'. (ObLanguageWar: I'm not trying to
353.
by jbert 17y ago
Editor+syntax highlighting for static analysis, and firefox+firebug for runtime errors?
354.
by jbert 17y ago
> Teach children to draw on a canvas in javascript. I've thought a few times that this is the modern equivalent of the immediate feedback "plot via BASIC". It's even better, given the fact that JS is a decent language and the results ar
355.
by jbert 17y ago
> When storing localtime+timezone, do as the article recommends. Store the timezone, not the offset from UTC. Store "New York time" not EST or EDT. The problem is that that isn't well defined, as I point out here: http://news.ycombinat
356.
by jbert 17y ago
> (2) local date-time with a geographical time zone. Note that timezones aren't just geographical. In London, you'll be in timezone GMT (+0000) for half the year and timezone BST (+0100) for half the year. If you think instead that you'
357.
by jbert 17y ago
Storing as localtime+timezone is asking for bugs since most people shift timezone twice a year. That makes testing a real problem. Store times internally as UTC (time_t epoch is a good representation, or the DateTime object of your preferen
358.
by jbert 17y ago
That's a great read, thanks very much. It might be worth submitting the link itself to get a wider audience.
359.
by jbert 17y ago
> For example, you could not use human power to drive most of the things we drive with engines: cars, trains, ships, planes, etc. True, but not relevant to the initial, successful commercialisation of the technology. The mobile power pl
360.
by jbert 17y ago
If you're making the hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O, you're taking as much CO2 from the air as burning the hydrocarbons will liberate. Obviously, you need to put in the energy too. But I think synthetic hydrocarbons are a great way to carry

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