jbert

55 ms·

481.
by jbert 18y ago
The rule of thumb (swap should be 2-3x RAM) has survived because it has minimal downside (you don't generally miss that amount of disk) and a small upside (you see performance degradation as the first symptom of memory overloading, rather t
482.
by jbert 18y ago
"I agree there's much confusion about Erlang concurrency being related to it being a functional programming language," While the term "functional programming language" is sometimes abused to mean different things, isn't the canonical meanin
483.
by jbert 18y ago
Does anyone have any tools or thoughts on how to turn live traffic (from log and/or tcpdump) into test load for a write-heavy site? (I've found this useful for regression testing and performance in the past on a mostly readonly site). At th
484.
by jbert 18y ago
It's not so much loony as irrational. Faith is irrational, by definition (Pascal's wager notwithstanding). Many people believe in many irrational things (the perfection of their children, the ability of their team to win this game) and dece
485.
by jbert 18y ago
Ah, thanks. Well, the demand generally increases over time, so efficiency just means you can delay building that next 100MW plant in the US a while longer - which is useful. I agree with his basic point that "a dense form of energy is usefu
486.
by jbert 18y ago
"The combination of these problems [storage and transmission aren't 100% efficient] means that household energy conservation is mainly a way for wealthy Westerners to feel virtuous rather than an actual attack on energy costs. Household con
487.
by jbert 18y ago
You can have a smaller 'premium team', who you select from your existing team for competence and niceness. You then make it part of the job ("have a nice day") using existing procedures. Interestingly, this would also have the effect of mak
488.
by jbert 18y ago
My theory on this is that it does use a bunch of wiring used for social behaviour. An important part of social behaviour is reputation and an important part of reputation is how often we make incorrect statements. So when we're about to com
489.
by jbert 18y ago
> the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... I'd argue that this is ergonmically essential for long-term emacs use, otherwise you run the risk of 'emacs claw'
490.
by jbert 18y ago
That's an interesting criterion, but there are plenty of "traditional" desktop apps who keep data server side (any thin-client DB program using ODBC, subversion clients, etc). Even IMAP email clients I suppose. So is a web app "something wh
491.
by jbert 18y ago
> And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app. So why choose to write a "web app" in that case? What distinguishes the two - what is the defining characteristic of a web app? (One comes on a CD, one is downl
492.
by jbert 18y ago
ObPeeve: In general, you don't focus lasers. The narrow beam is a result of it being collimated as it's produced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Laser_physics
493.
by jbert 19y ago
Agreed. An interesting alternative approach to a single 'parent' pointer in the record is the use of an ancestor table. http://www.evolt.org/working_with_hierarchical_data_in_sql_u... This allows all children (or parents) to be fetched in
494.
by jbert 19y ago
I have a two year old. He can reason. "But I WAAANNNT TOOOO..." 'Firstly - that's whining. And you know that you are less likely to get what you want when you whine, don't you?' 'Secondly, the reason you can't go over there is because that
495.
by jbert 19y ago
I think the hardest problem with that approach would be avoiding a false-positive of detecting people who hold controversial opinions as trolls. The moderation graph between users and comments would be really interesting. There's a lot of i
496.
by jbert 19y ago
My hunch is that it's down to cache invalidation logic. It's easier for the app to know when a single memcached entry needs to be invalidated than for the SQL engine, which perhaps tends to be conservative in what it can cache. (e.g. MySQL
497.
by jbert 19y ago
Perl has fairly decent utf8 support, off by default: use utf8; allows source to be written in utf8 (string literals, function+variable names etc). Filehandles aren't utf8 by default, but can be put into utf8 mode with the 'binmode'
498.
by jbert 19y ago
Thanks to you and shiro for the replies. It sounds as though the REPL is more useful for inspection than modification - which makes sense. Graceful addition of new functionality is useful, but provided by other frameworks. /goes off to thin
499.
by jbert 19y ago
I've also heard that the viewpoint that successful consultants don't "look like" permies. Doing otherwise might increase the perception that their work is something which could instead be done by a permanent employee. No axe to grind, worke
500.
by jbert 19y ago
I like the idea of a REPL into my web app (may add one actually - different language, but that's not the issue). But can a production-lisper tell me what is best practice regarding versioning and saving to files? I'm assuming that modificat
501.
by jbert 19y ago
There are two different markets. One is turned off by stuffiness (as proxied via "business-speak" and "dignity") and one is turned off by, I don't know, "unreliability" (as proxied by profanity, not sure what else). You can serve one or oth
502.
by jbert 19y ago
See also: http://brad.livejournal.com/2230083.html epoll-driven jabberd from Brad "LiveJournal" F, scaling to 25k connections in 97Mbyte of RAM.
503.
by jbert 20y ago
You should be able to improve over naive RAID by pairing a relatively-high-probability-of-failure drive with a low prob one. i.e. what you *shouldn't* do is the common practice of putting two new drives in a mirror, since they are both i