neilc

83 ms·

691.
by neilc 18y ago
Strange -- when I've had to use Zimbra in the past, I've found it to be a very painful and frustrating experience. In comparison, GMail is an utter joy.
692.
by neilc 18y ago
Sure, but you wouldn't expect someone running the technology for the city of DC to try to address the broader, federal issues.
693.
by neilc 18y ago
Fairly true. It's worth noting that career prospects outside academia for a CS graduate students are often considerably better than for graduate students in other fields (and somewhat better if you do CS systems than theory).
694.
by neilc 18y ago
If you're running a small site (say, 1,000,000 pageviews per month), you aren't going to have trouble scaling a MySQL/PostgreSQL database and application. You'll normally be showing one pageview per second at that rate. So, it's just as ea
695.
by neilc 18y ago
Why does the insurance company need to be stupid?
696.
by neilc 18y ago
Right, but those are both less convenient than just buying water when you feel like it, and throwing out the bottle afterward. People are happy to pay for convenience (and that seems quite rational to me).
697.
by neilc 18y ago
Postgres does somewhat better than MySQL on a single box with multiple cores ... mainly because of the work Sun put into scaling it before they bought MySQL. That's not really the case. Sun has some some benchmarking, but most of the work
698.
by neilc 18y ago
It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.
699.
by neilc 18y ago
i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas How would you know?
700.
How I almost killed Facebook(matt-welsh.blogspot.com)
157 points by neilc 18y ago|55 comments
701.
A tale of three code generators(advogato.org)
8 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
702.
by neilc 18y ago
You wouldn't work for a company that requires you to present a resume? That is basically equivalent to not working for any company at all, other than as a consultant or a founder. Making a decent resume is not difficult, and done well, it i
703.
by neilc 18y ago
Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich. Partly because "we" (HN) are biased toward consumer-facing web startups, which are typically not the sort of companies started by academics, or
704.
by neilc 18y ago
No one is using C anymore, except for trivial things like kernels, database systems, and VMs.
705.
by neilc 18y ago
As the article makes clear, these are not buffer overflows in the algorithms themselves, they are just overflows in the reference implementations.
706.
by neilc 18y ago
There's a lot of prior work that is related to this idea. For example: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6469... An interesting point about their approach is that it is independent of file size : they just need to k
707.
by neilc 18y ago
Sure, TC has a lot of crap. It doesn't all need to be posted/upvoted at HN, though.
708.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't mean to gripe, but why is this interesting? The HR staff at a startup made a common and mildly embarrassing mistake that is unlikely to be of any long-term significance.
709.
by neilc 18y ago
This article is complete fluff.
710.
by neilc 18y ago
I'm very happy that I upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4GB of RAM -- as depressing as it may be, it was just painful trying to do work with only 2GB of RAM, and 4GB is barely enough. The biggest memory hog is VMWare, but Eclipse, Firefox, and OSX
711.
by neilc 18y ago
Why is that bad? The query plans the RDBMs uses end up being slow. I think it's simply not the case that people are using key-value stores because the query plans that a typical DBMS optimizer chooses are suboptimal for the kinds of queri
712.
Above The Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing(berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com)
5 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
713.
by neilc 18y ago
Isn't the constant dribbling of e-mail distracting? Yes, it is. There's a reason why Knuth answers regular mail as a batch process (once every few months), for example. A common productivity tip is to limit yourself to checking email only
714.
by neilc 18y ago
Github is YCombinator (I think, right?) Not AFAIK: "We had a talk and agreed right away: no outside funding. We wanted to keep the whole company." http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/how-github-used....
715.
Ethanol, Just Recently a Savior, Is Struggling(nytimes.com)
1 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
716.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't think the advice is "learn to code", as such; rather, the author's saying "be prepared to do whatever your business needs to be successful." Obviously the CEO shouldn't be writing a lot of code in the long run, but at a startup, eve
717.
by neilc 18y ago
you have to rewrite a whole block to modify a bit Technically, you can change bits from 1 => 0; you need to erase a whole block to go from 0 => 1.
718.
Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life(nytimes.com)
3 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
719.
by neilc 18y ago
Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds. That sounds like a surefire way to encourage provocation (a.k.a trolling). If you make a deliberately provocative and clueless statement and n people take the time to
720.
Theory and Experiment Meet, and a New Form of Boron Is Found (via Genetic Algorithm)(nytimes.com)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments

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