neilc

46 ms·

391.
by neilc 17y ago
The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents (... unless they do a startup company, of course). But ot
392.
by neilc 17y ago
What? The comment you're replying to was asking about the individuals involved in the CRU hack, not anything involving Nate Silvers.
393.
SIGMOD 2010 Programming Contest: Distributed Query Processor(dbweb.enst.fr)
2 points by neilc 17y ago|0 comments
394.
by neilc 17y ago
In fact, even that phrasing is slightly misleading, because it suggests causality -- I suspect the evidence only supports correlation. The article is a particularly idiotic example of uninformed speculation passing for science journalism.
395.
by neilc 17y ago
Also, there is a lot of cold data out there. Storing all of it in RAM just doesn't make sense right now, given upfront + ongoing expense (energy).
396.
by neilc 17y ago
The only obstacle they mention to realizing 5-10µs latency per se is that networking infrastructure can't yet support it. The paper also talks about other issues that will need to be resolved (Section 4.1): software overheads like context
397.
by neilc 17y ago
Simply storing the data in memory, with backup on disk, is not difficult or novel. The hard part is meeting the design's performance goals: "It should be possible to achieve access latencies of 5- 10 microseconds, measured end-to-end for a
398.
by neilc 17y ago
A binary distinction between "stupid" (Gladwell?) and "clever" (domain expert) isn't very helpful here. Gladwell's ability to take obscure scientific results and present them in a relevant, insightful way is very powerful. If anything, I th
399.
by neilc 17y ago
He zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find Not necessarily: the key to getting a letter to the editor published is to make a single coherent point, and to express yourself well. A letter to the editor is not the right venue for a
400.
by neilc 17y ago
I don't think it's any different than the Twitter accounts of countless other politicians and public figures, many/most of which are actually ghost-written (e.g. http://twitter.com/SENJohnMcCain , which uses the first person). Anyone who
401.
by neilc 17y ago
I don't think there's really a big ethical difference between MS, and other big companies like IBM and HP. Each company does a lot of research that benefits the community at large; they also need to recoup that investment via patents, techn
402.
by neilc 17y ago
Yeah, I thought it was worth reading. I liked Bentley's Programming Pearls more though, as a book in a similar vein.
403.
by neilc 17y ago
A large portion of them could be sped up by simply configuring them properly, using nothing but the facilities that are available today. Probably true, but not relevant to SPDY: you can't assume that every website in the world is going to
404.
by neilc 17y ago
RMS is going to be sleeping on a friend of mine's couch (no joke). Apparently he prefers to stay with graduate students, rather than sleep in a hotel.
405.
by neilc 17y ago
They're the only company with the means to take on such massive, unprofitable projects, and at the same time enough street cred that everyone won't immediately assume they're trying to make the web proprietary. They are hardly the only co
406.
by neilc 17y ago
I'm impressed that they're able to get such good performance (and latency) while still running the traffic over SSL. For example, average page load time over SSL is 1899 ms ("SPDY basic single-domain / SSL"), compared to 3112 ms for plain H
407.
Cloud MapReduce(code.google.com)
3 points by neilc 17y ago|1 comments
408.
by neilc 17y ago
Mihai estimates that without Closure, Reader's JavaScript code would be a massive 2 megabytes Wow. That just seems wrong to me.
409.
by neilc 17y ago
Yeah, I was talking more about the NXDOMAIN stuff. As for CDNs, his gripe is with implementing CDNs via DNS, not the CDN concept itself.
410.
by neilc 17y ago
Another way to phrase that would be "Short-term advertising revenue vs. ensuring the vitality of fundamental Internet infrastructure."
411.
by neilc 17y ago
To get the list started, "Founders at Work" was outstanding -- by far the best business book I've read. Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start" was okay, but it was too superficial / trite for my taste.
412.
Ask YC: Business books actually worth reading?
4 points by neilc 17y ago|9 comments
413.
by neilc 17y ago
Sounds like a good idea, although personally I think a cash game would be more fun than tournaments.
414.
by neilc 17y ago
There's certainly been drama, but I don't think that eBay was ignorant of the fact that they never purchased some of the core Skype/Joltid technology -- per http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/technology/companies/07sky... "EBay did not pur
415.
by neilc 17y ago
> If you're not on the conference calls and meetings that involve money, you're a sucker. The article's point is that if you want to make enough money to retire, you're not going to do that with << 1% equity vesting over four ye
416.
by neilc 17y ago
Not only that, but INS treat green card applicants (and really all other members of the public) like crap. I know lots of Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley who earn hefty salaries, manage large teams, and start companies -- and th
417.
by neilc 17y ago
Sure, in theory, but for right now Redis/Tokyo Tyrant/etc actually exist and are free. Yes, there's a question of whether we are talking the right way to build systems, or which system you ought to use in production tomorrow. Building a w
418.
Mike Stonebraker: The "NoSQL" Discussion has Nothing to Do With SQL(cacm.acm.org)
51 points by neilc 17y ago|35 comments
419.
by neilc 17y ago
I'm pretty sure Don Dodge will do just fine looking for a new job, regardless of what TechCrunch posts.
420.
by neilc 17y ago
Did you read the article? The author explicitly notes this point, and argues for why the evidence points toward a causal relationship, rather than simply a correlation. (Although yummyfajitas points out, that argument isn't necessarily conv

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