neilc

80 ms·

751.
First Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest(db.csail.mit.edu)
1 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
752.
by neilc 18y ago
I've never found much of a need for a GUI for version control -- especially with SVN, which has such a simple model (visualizing the revision graph for something like Monotone is useful, because it can become complex). Viewing diffs is triv
753.
by neilc 18y ago
Not the "same" 20%, no: the same optimization could be applied to Python 2.x, presumably yielding a comparable relative speedup.
754.
by neilc 18y ago
Most of Zed's rants don't have much to do with technical insight, and a lot more about silly personality issues and bickering.
755.
by neilc 18y ago
I didn't get much out of this. Their traffic numbers are unremarkable. There's the standard "databases are hard to scale" meme, and their software stack is also pretty standard. Gnip as a business are interesting, though: there's a ton of
756.
by neilc 18y ago
In the academic world, the semantic web is pretty much taken for granted. This is absolutely not the case. Among the Semantic Web community , the SW might be taken for granted (to some extent), but among the wider CS community, there is
757.
by neilc 18y ago
Except that this is a pretty common practice: at most reputable schools, if you can demonstrate you don't need to take an introductory programming class, you can switch to a more advanced class.
758.
by neilc 18y ago
NYT, WaPo, and even CNN have considerably more class and integrity than CNet, IMHO -- and outside the media world, there are many organizations of 2000+ people I have more respect for.
759.
by neilc 18y ago
There used to be lots of little declarative DSLs. Think make. Now they have been co-opted by XML. Ant uses XML, but would be much prettier if it had its own DSL. XML is orthogonal: it is just another way of expressing the syntax of a DSL.
760.
by neilc 18y ago
No one I know uses Facebook Chat.
761.
by neilc 18y ago
Really? Do you have a source for those statements from Google engineers?
762.
by neilc 18y ago
You think CNet has "class" and "journalistic integrity"? Wow.
763.
by neilc 18y ago
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7724296011317502612 is a Google Tech Talk by one of the main Mercurial developers.
764.
by neilc 18y ago
Mostly it is just hype/marketing: technically, it's a wash.
765.
by neilc 18y ago
The animation that happens when Expose is activated, the "Genie Effect" for minimizing windows, and the reflections of dock icons that show up when the dock is at the bottom of the screen are examples that come immediately to mind. (Arstech
766.
by neilc 18y ago
Another consideration is how you actually convince your prospective hire to join the company: particularly in a startup, the sort of person you want to hire is very likely to have multiple offers to choose amongst. When interviewing someone
767.
by neilc 18y ago
Sounds very similar to ReVirt: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/virtual/papers/dunlap02.pdf The idea is pretty cool: run a virtual machine, and record all the values and precise timings of all the non-deterministic events that affect the state o
768.
by neilc 18y ago
You originally said that the idea that OO languages are imperative is "silly", and that: Anyone who has worked with a pure OO language knows that there's nothing inherently imperative about the approach. Can you provide some examples of h
769.
by neilc 18y ago
A Prolog program is not specified in terms of a "sequence of steps", for example. Of course, the implementation involves a sequence of operations (because it is typically going to be evaluated on a Von Neumann-style machine), but that has
770.
by neilc 18y ago
Did you simply just ignore Jason's point about reaching a broader audience? That seems like quite a legitimate reason to use an established publisher.
771.
by neilc 18y ago
Was Pounce really "stuff people want"? Without knowing the terms of the Pounce acquisition, it's hard to say whether this is closer to success or failure. SixApart certainly aren't buying Pounce because of the quality/popularity of their pr
772.
by neilc 18y ago
You can use a dataflow graph to do distributed programming. Kamaelia is useful for more than just distributed programming, I agree, but I think programming concurrent/distributed systems is one of their main goals, as I understand it.
773.
Kamaelia - Distributed Programming in Python(kamaelia.org)
3 points by neilc 18y ago|3 comments
774.
by neilc 18y ago
This man's reputation in his declared field is nowhere near his apparent stature in his own mind Really? He is one of the coinventors of Kolmogorov complexity, and Kolmogorov complexity certainly does shed a lot of light on the relationsh
775.
by neilc 18y ago
Although that's still a moderate pain in the ass, and might be infeasible, depending on where you live in SF and how close your job is to Caltrain. Depending on public transit in the Bay Area (outside SF proper) is pretty rough.
776.
by neilc 18y ago
Are you more interested in relational theory, or in implementation techniques for database systems? If the latter, the Ramakrishnan and Gehrke book (the "cow book") is really good: fairly broad coverage, but very well-written and precise. I
777.
by neilc 18y ago
Suppose the analysis program is given an input that fails to terminate. The client expects your program to indicate this fact after a finite time, but your program will not be able to do so in the general case. In any case, looking at indiv
778.
by neilc 18y ago
The job of the program is to return true or false; until it does that, it can't be said to be "basically doing its job" if it never terminates. The client might also not be able to tell you that a solution of "while (true) ;" is "wrong" bec
779.
by neilc 18y ago
Right. The JVM implements a virtual instruction set (JVM bytecode); it does not virtualize the operating system.
780.
by neilc 18y ago
Virtualization of the operating system is also taking place. Most languages written this decade do not talk directly to the underlying system. Instead, the language is intended to run a virtual machine that in turn performs the execution a

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