neilc

32 ms·

271.
by neilc 16y ago
Sure; my point is that people are perhaps misspending their income anyway. That is, the guy making $1 million per year could just as easily decide to earn $200,000/year and have a lot more freedom. (In any case, $60k/year is meaningless wit
272.
by neilc 16y ago
If I made, say, $1 million/year, I think I'd be happier -- for the simple reason that I could afford to only work one day per week (or a few months per year, or work for 5 years and then semi-retire, etc.). That would mean a lot more freedo
273.
by neilc 16y ago
I think Cassandra always writes to the Commit Log before returning success Sure, but the write is not the significant part (it is likely to be cached in memory); the question is how often the commit log is sync'ed to disk. I'm no Cassandr
274.
by neilc 16y ago
Given that it is in "platform/bootable/bootloader/legacy", I'm not sure there is much point getting all worked up about performance -- presumably something much more efficient would be used for the vast majority of cases.
275.
by neilc 16y ago
Any halfway decent software shop will have a policy of compiling with all warnings enabled FWIW, your definition of "halfway decent" would exclude most software shops in the world. It is extremely unprofessional to disable or ignore warn
276.
by neilc 16y ago
Microsoft and Intel are two other notables that are missing.
277.
by neilc 16y ago
The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. Interesting to see Mozilla support the idea that Theora provides markedly worse quality-per-bit than H.264.
278.
by neilc 16y ago
Fair enough -- presumably both of those are simplified if you s/mutual fund/hedge fund/.
279.
by neilc 16y ago
Thanks! Interesting answer. With respect to (1), wouldn't a mutual fund have access to the same sorts of low liquidity opportunities? That seems like a possible reason to prefer a managed fund over an index fund, despite the higher fees.
280.
by neilc 16y ago
If you mean the recent losses, then that is not the point: the boards must have a reason for hiring highly-paid money managers. Besides, the long-term returns for the Harvard/Yale/etc. endowments are very impressive, and the rumour is tha
281.
by neilc 16y ago
And this is despite the fact that on average, experts can't beat a monkey with a dartboard when it comes to picking stocks. Every study has shown this to be true. If that is true (and I've certainly heard it repeated often enough), then w
282.
by neilc 16y ago
They've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a) selling or b) going public. That doesn't follow "by definition" -- although I agree that the former generally implies the latter.
283.
by neilc 16y ago
If multiprocessing exposed such an option, it would effectively be harder to write non-portable code, which seems like a good thing (to do optionally). You could then switch on "no, do a sensible fork(2)" purely as a performance optimizatio
284.
by neilc 16y ago
They asked if he would publish excerpts. Except they didn't, at least not in any publicly-posted email that I can see. In fact, they describe the excerpt as "exclusive" to Fortune -- they asked Arrington to post "on the book excerpts", no
285.
by neilc 16y ago
Fortune is jerking him around. I don't see how: at least in the emails posted, Fortune never authorizes Arrington to post the full excerpt: they talk about writing a post "on the book excerpts". In any case, I think it is more likely to b
286.
by neilc 16y ago
Monica Lam at Stanford has been talking about similar ideas in an academic setting. E.g., http://suif.stanford.edu/~lam/ibm.pdf (10MB), http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/
287.
by neilc 16y ago
You learn nothing of use to you For a small percentage of startups, that might be true, but I think it is far from true for most startups. Consider the 1-year "mini-MBA" at Duke that Wadhwa mentions, which covers "marketing, finance, in
288.
by neilc 16y ago
MBAs train you to be junior officers in the armies of managerial capitalism. Some MBA programs do -- most, even. But more and more programs are focusing on entrepreneurship. I think it is pretty obvious that having an MBA is useful if y
289.
by neilc 16y ago
That an optimizer assumes without proof a solution to the halting problem for some sub-program would mean that it's an unreliable translator The optimizer doesn't need to solve the halting problem for this example. It merely needs to prov
290.
by neilc 16y ago
Termination is an observable side-effect of a program Not per the C99 spec, at least (5.1.2.3: "Accessing a volatile object, modifying an object, modifying a file, or calling a function that does any of those operations are all side effec
291.
by neilc 16y ago
From the abstract of the paper: VMKit furthermore has performance comparable to the well established open source MREs Cacao, Apache Harmony and Mono, and is 1.2 to 3 times slower than JikesRVM on most of the DaCapo benchmarks Going throug
292.
Music education versus computer science education(emilsit.net)
4 points by neilc 16y ago|0 comments
293.
by neilc 16y ago
Kleinberg, not Kleinberger, and he's a prof at Cornell, not CMU. I'd guess it has less to with geography, and more to do with the fact that Kleinberg is a (brilliant, celebrated) academic who probably wasn't very interested in doing a start
294.
by neilc 17y ago
I have yet to find any reason to use anything else. For lightweight text editing and easy document sharing, GDocs is perfectly adequate. For more serious document preparation (i.e. when you care what the output looks like), it still has a
295.
by neilc 17y ago
Actually, pipes or tubes are not that bad of an analogy for network links.
296.
The Future of Computer Science, and Why Every Other Major Sucks By Comparison(scottaaronson.com)
44 points by neilc 17y ago|31 comments
297.
by neilc 17y ago
The 5D Mark II came out at the end of 2008. The Mark III is widely rumored, but hasn't been officially announced; most people are guessing it will arrive toward the end of 2010 or early 2011. canonrumors.com has lots of this kind of specula
298.
by neilc 17y ago
I remember a paper that asked participants to note down the last two digits of their social security, and subjects anchored themselves to that (statistically significantly- one of the authors was Dan Ariely). Do you have a link? I am ver
299.
by neilc 17y ago
The fact that they are net-successful doesn't mean that every aspect of their approach is a good idea.
300.
by neilc 17y ago
Apple's application review process has as much, or more, to do with your success than whether your users love the app or not. That is absurd. There are 150,000+ apps on the App Store. Those have all passed Apple's review process, by defin

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