neilc

54 ms·

481.
by neilc 17y ago
I'm confused: the benchmark notes explicitly say: Programs may use kernel threads, lightweight threads; but coroutines, cooperative threads and other programs with custom schedulers will be listed as interesting alternative implementations
482.
by neilc 17y ago
I thought this paper, mentioned in the comments, was a lot more interesting: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=95436 Argues that extreme value theory predicts the best time for 100m dash in the near future is 9.51 sec.
483.
When 640KB is Still a Lot of Memory (on scaling Layer 2 networks)(idleprocess.wordpress.com)
3 points by neilc 17y ago|0 comments
484.
Dyatlov Pass incident(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by neilc 17y ago|1 comments
485.
by neilc 17y ago
The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I ac
486.
Google's chief accepted gear but no pay as Apple board member(appleinsider.com)
4 points by neilc 17y ago|2 comments
487.
by neilc 17y ago
Why is it "important to note that"? Palm obviously have their reasons for preferring iTunes, but that doesn't make faking the vendor ID any more legitimate.
488.
by neilc 17y ago
people like you will drive a coffee shop out of business. That is more likely to be true if the shop is full to capacity (e.g. during the lunch rush, etc.). When there is free space, your marginal cost to the coffee shop is just electrici
489.
by neilc 17y ago
Note that the array_accum user-defined agg described by that blog post is built into PostgreSQL 8.4 (it's called array_agg(), per the SQL standard).
490.
The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop(coffeeandcode.org)
28 points by neilc 17y ago|43 comments
491.
by neilc 17y ago
Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc (those quest
492.
by neilc 17y ago
No, they obviously do not. (Being bright is always helpful, of course, but they are pretty different skill sets, I think.) This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research
493.
by neilc 17y ago
He is a well-known hacker, but this isn't news.
494.
by neilc 17y ago
The fact that the ratio continues to grow seems like a fundamental property of technology -- personally I don't find it sad. In exchange for more powerful tools, you inevitably need to accept more levels of abstraction and more underlying c
495.
Skim.app: PDF reader and note taker for OSX(skim-app.sourceforge.net)
2 points by neilc 17y ago|0 comments
496.
by neilc 17y ago
That is silly; there are plenty of situations in which macros are useful in C. I'd be inclined to avoid complex multi-line macros that multiply-evaluate their arguments unless there's a compelling need for them, however.
497.
by neilc 17y ago
Thanks for mentioning that link -- that's a nice library.
498.
by neilc 17y ago
Yeah, arena allocators are great. I wouldn't immediately go and write my own from scratch, though: talloc ( http://talloc.samba.org/ ), Postgres, and APR all implement variants on the arena idea that you can copy from liberally.
499.
by neilc 17y ago
Running a consulting firm around Hadoop and related technologies makes a lot of sense, but taking VC funding to do so is surprising, IMHO (Cloudera are backed by Accel and Greylock). A consulting firm has relatively small capital requiremen
500.
by neilc 17y ago
Yeah, I was confused by that -- was mentioning the Crunchie and the Europa Award in the same sentence as the Nobel and the Pulitzer a joke? If not, wow.
501.
by neilc 17y ago
Given the "noprocrast" feature on HN, I think that's not uncommon.
502.
by neilc 17y ago
Why would you want to use smtp.gmail.com, rather than the SMTP server that matches your From address?
503.
by neilc 17y ago
I don't know how you could call the latest version of any of the major databases "traditional" Oracle has done MVCC for many years, as has Postgres. The canonical paper on optimistic concurrency control for DBs is from 1981 ( http://www.s
504.
by neilc 17y ago
I think it's interesting that there are attacks against AES-256 that don't work against AES-128. Apparently, "the key schedule for 256-bit version is pretty lousy." Surprising, to me at least.
505.
by neilc 17y ago
Sorry, statements like what?
506.
by neilc 17y ago
100 years might be an overstatement: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/barefoot/
507.
by neilc 17y ago
In fairness, log-structured storage is not a new idea. This paper is a great, classic read on the subject: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/LFS.pdf
508.
by neilc 17y ago
Database consistency problems require traditional databases to use complicated locks. Because RethinkDB data is always consistent, locking is unnecessary. You may not use locking for concurrency control (plenty of "traditional DBs" don't,
509.
by neilc 17y ago
Note that this is not identical to withdrawing MD6 from the "SHA-3 contest" -- they are just not entering the next round of the contest, because they haven't figured out how to prove the resistance of MD6 to differential attacks while makin
510.
by neilc 17y ago
My uncle had horrible handwriting, and then learned calligraphy, so he now writes beautifully. I would be sad to see that art form die off. But other than that, I'm happy to see cursive handwriting disappearing.

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