neilc

90 ms·

871.
by neilc 18y ago
You seem to have missed out on the fact that the author has actually originally written a book that satisfies his criteria. The problem isn't fixed merely by adding more content. The point is that there is value in a certain style of book
872.
by neilc 18y ago
Does anyone actually use Facebook chat? Leaving aside the details of the implementation, chatting via the FB web interface seems terribly awkward. And while I can use XMPP, most of the people you'd be chatting with won't be.
873.
Freebase mashup: restaurants ordered by health department score(blog.freebase.com)
6 points by neilc 18y ago|1 comments
874.
by neilc 18y ago
Do you really think that the situation was significantly different in the past?
875.
by neilc 18y ago
Overall, I wouldn't agree that "science is having a hard time", either. I don't think trends in PhD production are consistent with your argument (PhD production is basically at an all-time high). The Internet and the computer revolution are
876.
by neilc 18y ago
This is one reason why science is getting extinct. That is a little hard to believe. The rate of scientific progress is, if anything, continuing to increase. As a society, we are increasingly dependent on science and technology. Science e
877.
by neilc 18y ago
I think the reason this is a bad idea is that in order to turn a blocking operation into an async one, you're adding a totally new transport layer (HTTP) and data representation (JSON), as well as middleware. That means a significant perfor
878.
by neilc 18y ago
Why is a Wikipedia "style guideline" relevant to a comment on HN? Wikipedia guidelines are for writing encyclopedic content, not for comments on a discussion site.
879.
by neilc 18y ago
To be honest I can't take it seriously when a company that makes billions from crawling other people's sites makes a rule that you're not allowed to crawl theirs. Why not? Google obeys robots.txt -- if you don't want them to crawl your si
880.
by neilc 18y ago
The "innovators" accepted by DreamIt then have the option of teaming up with the accepted "strategists" to help out with the business side of the fledgling company. That's an interesting idea. I think that quite a few hackers could use a
881.
by neilc 18y ago
"Stateful XML protocol" makes complete sense, it just isn't very informative. It describes a protocol that is both stateful and XML-based. Those are independent attributes of a protocol; obviously, you can have both stateful non-XML-based p
882.
by neilc 18y ago
The "money" type in Postgres is deprecated (e.g. see the locale-dependent restore issues that doc link mentions). "numeric" is an arbitrary precision data type that is probably a better choice for representing currency.
883.
by neilc 18y ago
airplanes are so unreliable that people are using them less and less Really? I think that airline travel was actually at an all-time high in the USA in 2007: http://www.bts.gov/programs/airline_information/air_carrier_...
884.
by neilc 18y ago
It's Microsoft's operating system, if they want to pre-install certain apps, why not? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Microsoft pre-installing apps, just like there is nothing wrong with Apple pre-installing apps on OSX, or Sun o
885.
InnoCentive: Open source science(nytimes.com)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
886.
by neilc 18y ago
If it's just an API term then why don't they just call it a "user thread"? Because that might be confused with other user thread implementations? It is also significantly more awkward than "fiber". Microsoft calls their implementation of
887.
by neilc 18y ago
Well, "fiber" is just the API's name for a user thread. Calling it a "marketing term" seems unfair -- it is just a piece of technical jargon.
888.
Why Does Win32 Even Have Fibers?(blogs.msdn.com)
10 points by neilc 18y ago|6 comments
889.
by neilc 18y ago
Agreed - they say you shouldn't hire someone who doesn't decide he wants to accept within a few days I think that's a terrible idea. You want to hire the best candidates, but those are exactly the people who will typically have multiple,
890.
by neilc 18y ago
Unix domain sockets are fast. really fast. as in, beating shared memory sometimes fast Really? How would that be possible?
891.
by neilc 18y ago
The title is mildly trollish -- I'd think only a very small portion of iPhone v2 buyers will be affected by this. In fact, the v2 iPhone is more compatible with accessories, because Apple got rid of the recessed headphone jack.
892.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't think the primary role of a parent should be to literally teach your children to program, like a tutor. Instead, just expose them to some of the fascinating parts of computing, math, and science in general. If they're interested and
893.
Advice for Students (Especially Grad Students in Statistics)(www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
894.
by neilc 18y ago
There is tons of stuff on HN that doesn't qualify as "news". Personally, I think that's a good thing.
895.
by neilc 18y ago
Crazy talk. Apple hardware is nice, but OSX is at best mediocre for systems programming.
896.
Computer Science Enrollments: The Real News(cccblog.org)
26 points by neilc 18y ago|1 comments
897.
by neilc 18y ago
I thought the article was pretty terrible, but not because of the spelling mistakes. As an aside, just because you're not a native speaker of English is not an excuse for poor spelling: a foreigner can use a spellchecker just as well as a n
898.
by neilc 18y ago
Once the game is reduced to calculating the odds at any given moment and betting when they're in your favor, even a simple machine should be able to beat a human as long as it makes reliable calculations. You clearly don't have much of a
899.
by neilc 18y ago
Yeah, honestly -- who would vote this article up? I wonder if we need something akin to meta-moderation, to account for people who vote up low-quality articles.
900.
by neilc 18y ago
Yes, definitely the best introductory book on the subject I've ever seen. Indeed, the Sipser book is a model for how to write a very readable, accessible CS theory textbook. As far as how complexity theory on parallel computing, communicati

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