neilc

189 ms·

781.
by neilc 18y ago
Interesting that you describe the position as a "Computer Scientist". Unfortunately it sounds more like software engineering.
782.
by neilc 18y ago
Well, I'm pretty sure the article is about the death of cafes in France. But in any case, the much-predicted death of the NYT isn't something I'm looking forward too, either.
783.
by neilc 18y ago
As they say, opinions are like assholes. Reading that post, it seems clear to me that Scoble barely took the time to proofread it before posting, let alone spending enough time to really understand the problems with the American auto indust
784.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't know what would be going through the mind of someone that thinks that Enums should be modeled by using separate tables (i.e. one table for males, one for females; modeling the enum Gender = Male | Female), so I am not even going to
785.
by neilc 18y ago
ORM examples that feature single table selects are unconvincing: the true test of an ORM is whether it can do joins (outer + inner), aggregation, and subqueries. Otherwise it is little more than syntax sugar, IMHO.
786.
by neilc 18y ago
Well, I'm obviously not arguing you should hire indiscriminately. I just think that asking "will the employee be essential to the existence of the company?" is the wrong test for deciding whether to hire someone. Employees are toxic. Th
787.
by neilc 18y ago
Hiring only "essential" employees is often not a very intelligent strategy, if you have the funding to hire more aggressively and the opportunities to use the employees productivity.
788.
by neilc 18y ago
The Java on OSX situation is pretty deplorable, I agree. But that is not equivalent to "treating their third-party developers like crap." Java is an underprivileged minority on the OSX desktop, for better or worse.
789.
by neilc 18y ago
Transmitting data in the light emitted by brake lights, head lights, and traffic signals? Now that is cool.
790.
by neilc 18y ago
Yeah, I was surprised by the author's confidence in dismissing M:N threading. Does anyone know if there's a consensus on this point among implementers of threading packages?
791.
by neilc 18y ago
Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Damn it, Icanhascheezburger.com is not Web 2.0.
792.
by neilc 18y ago
Why? Just because email is effective for normal workers doesn't mean it is necessarily the right tool for the president to use.
793.
by neilc 18y ago
Neither Ruby nor Python makes it impossible write threaded programs, with all the ensuing dangers -- their standard implementations just don't implement threading very well. I think it's a stretch to say that this constitutes an intentional
794.
by neilc 18y ago
The title is trollish: concurrency is not a "myth" in either Ruby or Python -- you just need to use the appropriate techniques (process-level parallelism, non-blocking I/O, etc.) to achieve it. The existence of the GIL is well-known.
795.
by neilc 18y ago
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/11/plop-probabilisti...
796.
by neilc 18y ago
Multiple applications talking to one database is the common case.
797.
by neilc 18y ago
"The New New Thing" is among his best, and the most directly relevant for the HN crowd -- a really insightful look at Silicon Valley history in the mid 90s and the story behind SGI, Netscape, and Jim Clark.
798.
by neilc 18y ago
Leveraging parallelism on a single multi-core machine has a definite resemblance to leveraging parallelism in a cluster of machines: memory access costs are likely to be non-uniform, for example (the cores on chip X are "closer" to memory r
799.
Hints for Computer System Design (Butler Lampson)(research.microsoft.com)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
800.
by neilc 18y ago
MS would also face a considerable cost in emulating the various IE brokenness in a WebKit-based browser (and accurate emulation would be very important to a lot of people).
801.
by neilc 18y ago
5-7 years is not a big deal -- it's more a question of what your attitude is, and what kind of lifestyle you expect to lead. There are tons of 30+ software engineers in the Valley.
802.
by neilc 18y ago
I doubt Microsoft makes very much money off Visual Studio -- it is far more strategically important for them to have developers writing code on the various Microsoft platforms. That's been reflected in MS giving away various tools, like Vis
803.
by neilc 18y ago
Plenty of database workloads involve a lot of random I/O (e.g. anything that does an index lookup is typically doing random I/O). In theory, you should be able to tell the query optimizer about the relative costs of random vs. sequential I/
804.
by neilc 18y ago
RAM is volatile, SSDs are not. Obviously not relevant in the case of swap, though.
805.
by neilc 18y ago
One interesting idea is to format your resume as a mind map[1]. You're likely to get either very positive or very negative responses, but I'd be curious to know if anyone's tried it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
806.
NIST crypto hash algorithm competition set to begin (nytimes.com)
1 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
807.
by neilc 18y ago
His homepage is amusingly antiquated, even for an academic.
808.
by neilc 18y ago
Amusing/disgusting, depending on your perspective: For laughs, this means that the following is valid C++0x: C:\Temp>type nokitty.cpp int main() { [](){}(); []{}(); } Unfortunately, it seems that GCC 4.4 doesn't sup
809.
Lambdas, auto, and static_assert: C++0x Features in VC10, Part 1(blogs.msdn.com)
1 points by neilc 18y ago|1 comments
810.
by neilc 18y ago
A directory that's incomplete is almost always worthless. Many directories are incomplete but still highly useful (e.g. Yelp is far from a complete directory even for cities like San Francisco, but it makes up for its lack of completene

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