mtdewcmu

86 ms·

781.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I agree that git is both a great advance and seems fundamentally broken at the same time. One of git's advances is that it treats commits as snapshots of the entire tree rather than diffs[1]. A snapshot might as well be a tarball of th
782.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I've been working for the past few weeks on a database that tracks genetic variants as they are found by sequencers. There's a need for things like unambiguous representations that could use CS knowledge. It seems to be very ad ho
783.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
A bug-proof language is like an uncrashable car.
784.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I've been thinking along similar lines, I think. One problem I see with data in RDBMSs is that data gets transformed in the process of importing it to match the schema, and this transformation loses information, i.e. it's hard to
785.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>Not really. Most of the time is just the mental analogue of fart jokes. I didn't say all insights were equal. If this was just a fart joke, I wouldn't have thought it was funny. But you can't draw a line between insight
786.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I guess I missed that. I was looking for a link to an About page or a FAQ.
787.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
That's cool. I can't foresee too many issues in putting an X server in the browser. Except that if you left the page, all of the clients would get killed in a fairly rough fashion. Could you run a window manager?
788.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I definitely got the feeling from toying with node that you're working at a very low level, basically interfacing with system calls. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but you have to understand that in order to kno
789.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>> I'm not a TCP expert, but apparently the closing initiator (the client in our case) should wait for acknowledgement from the other side of the connection before dying off, see Wikipedia link above. So, I set process.exit() to
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
A language can't suck just because it isn't Haskell or ML.
791.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
A browser-based vt100 terminal -- how cool would that be? I wonder if you could run X11 in a browser. You'd have to get around the fact that it couldn't accept client connections, but otherwise, it seems plausible.
792.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I guess the assumption is that if you're running the application with Citrix or VMWare, you'd have no other choice but to travel to the cloud datacenter on foot and install it manually on the server from a DVD. Fair assumption, I
793.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Techies like me will be puzzled by the incredible claim they're making without any explanation. In truth, I wouldn't have given it any credibility if it hadn't been on the front page of HN.
794.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I clicked the link to figure out how they solved the numerous technical problems of running native applications in a browser. It's a deceptive claim, and the web page is content-free, all marketing. I don't think it belongs on HN,
795.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I'm thinking that this could be a fairly easy problem and the RDBMS may be making it harder. This is probably a tricky indexing situation, so a lot of queries might be effectively unindexed. I'd like to see what the performance wo
796.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I wonder how much the indexes are helping. It sounds like it could be a hard case for a query planner. You might be doing more full table scans than you realize, and it might not be as slow as you might expect. I think regex searches do ful
797.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
As I understood it, the memory tables are read-only. They're like a cache. So transactions aren't needed.
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>> HN does not want you to write jokes in here -- and especially one liners without any other content. But humor is insight, and brevity is the soul of wit. I saw it as commentary on the headline itself, which was ambiguous and vague.
799.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
You couldn't possibly answer that.
800.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
That's kind of funny.
801.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
You'd expect hiring to be touchy-feely work that couldn't be done by machines. But, ironically, that seems not to be the case, as companies outsource to "recruiters" with computer-driven systems.
802.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Some microscopic organisms are said to have survived exposure to space. But just because some of the pieces have been shown to be plausible, doesn't justify accepting the entire scenario.
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Perfect. As long as programmer hasn't slipped a backdoor into their robot code...
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Paul Krugman has written at length (exhaustive length) about this. The rich invest money rather than spend it. Investment doesn't automatically create jobs. Jobs are what redistribute money back to a large number of people, who then tu
805.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I'm concerned that services tend to be luxuries and unreliable sources of work. I don't think they'll replace the manufacturing jobs that supported a stable and growing middle class for decades.
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>> First, money has to be spent somewhere Not really. When business owners save money on labor and have no need to reinvest in production, the money goes to corporate profits and gets siphoned off by Wall Street and wealthy investors.
807.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>> I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this kind. Supposedly after manufacturing, the economy will naturally transition to services. What I never got about this theory is what would account for the
808.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Yeah. Why cultivate social skills, when humans are being replaced by robots? I'd rather have programming skills.
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I was trying to make a joke. I like the idea that the economy should serve the worker, but I think that's essentially what Karl Marx was saying. The Cold War is over, and the future seems to belong to robots.
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by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Communist, eh?

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