neilc

117 ms·

901.
by neilc 18y ago
It’s a perfect storm, almost like mankind has never seen. Wow.
902.
by neilc 18y ago
Presumably he wrote the article to discuss the role that pot plays in his life as a graduate student. What he did not do is "whine" about why he "needs to resort" to smoking pot to "cope with his difficulties" -- the whole "whiny and irre
903.
by neilc 18y ago
I just found it ironic that many of us who do good work 80 to 100 hours per week You found it "ironic", did you? and come here for a break among our peers find a student who needs to resort to drugs to cope (or whatever) with his difficu
904.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't see why the vehemence is warranted; I also don't think the author of the article is "whining". He's just talking about how and why he smokes pot, and how that connects with graduate school in the humanities. It is refreshing to hear
905.
by neilc 18y ago
Not AFAICS; count( * ) and count( 1 ) are trivially equivalent, and this doesn't depend on the storage engine being used. It is true that count( * ) without a WHERE clause is much faster in MyISAM than in Innodb (or Postgres), but that is a
906.
by neilc 18y ago
you should be able to construct basic regular expressions to match things like email addresses Actually, writing a correct (per RFC) regex to recognize email addresses is far from simple.
907.
by neilc 18y ago
Sure, but he didn't have experience as a technology executive, and couldn't call "bullshit" on technical claims made by people reporting to him -- which is Joel's argument for why this sort of CEO isn't often a good idea.
908.
by neilc 18y ago
Per Wikipedia: After the book was written, but before it hit bookstores, Gates recognized that the Internet was gaining the critical mass needed to drive it to dominance, and on December 7, 1995 — just weeks after the release of the book —
909.
by neilc 18y ago
Not really: the practice of installing CEOs without a lot of industry experience is quite common (see Terry Semel). It might be obvious to you , but not to everyone.
910.
by neilc 18y ago
CS is basically a branch of applied mathematics, and is interesting enough. But it doesn't even remotely approach the kind of profundity you see in the basic sciences. I guess we'll have to disagree, but I think artificial intelligence, m
911.
by neilc 18y ago
I've heard this complaint before, but I personally use Gmail almost exclusively via IMAP, and it works fine.
912.
by neilc 18y ago
Someone prefers Zimbra to Gmail? Zimbra , of all things? Well, each to their own, I suppose. In my experience, it would be hard to find a webmail client that is worse than Zimbra.
913.
by neilc 18y ago
Steve Jobs said Microsoft has no taste, not Bill Gates. I think that if you're a good software developer (and BillG certainly qualifies), you need to at least have some degree of taste.
914.
by neilc 18y ago
Interesting article, although the basic thesis is not new. One way to view the application of machine learning to science is simply that ML automates part of the scientific method: inducing plausible hypotheses from the data. I don't see ho
915.
by neilc 18y ago
In what way?
916.
by neilc 18y ago
Why should the school system be in the business of running their own email servers? They don't generate their own power or purify their own water. The NSW Department of Education is probably not particularly skilled at running large IT infr
917.
by neilc 18y ago
[ Replying to a very old thread ] Indeed, fsync = off just means that the WAL isn't fsync'd at all, which can cause permanent corruption after a crash. PostgreSQL does support a "deferred logging" mode, in which one or more transactions can
918.
by neilc 18y ago
I don't think it really matters who is going to maintain the code in the future. Even if you think you're going to be the sole person maintaining the code for a long time, why is being "as clever as you can" a win? 5 years down the line i
919.
by neilc 18y ago
That's very cool -- I've often considered doing that (moving to a cheap Asian country). I'd be curious if you have any more advice about it -- which countries were good, what sort of places to stay in, etc.
920.
by neilc 18y ago
In that particular case, ack's performance advantage seems to arise mostly because of a bug that causes GNU grep to be terribly slow in multibyte locales: http://blog.i-no.de/archives/2008/05/07/index.html http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/in
921.
by neilc 18y ago
It seems like it is only faster because it applies a bunch of heuristics to avoid searching certain files and directories altogether. I use "ack" myself and it's quite nice, but the heuristics aren't perfect: ack won't search for strings in
922.
Predicting Where You’ll Go and What You’ll Like(nytimes.com)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
923.
by neilc 18y ago
I certainly wouldn't have seen it on the front page of cnn.com -- CNN is not something I regularly check online.
924.
by neilc 18y ago
No equity at all? I doubt that. The eBay fiasco arose because one employee had ~28% equity in the company, which is far, far more than an engineer joining at this stage could reasonably expect to receive.
925.
by neilc 18y ago
So given an infinite set of possible theories to explain a data set, which theory should be preferred? Simple accuracy over the known data is frequently not sufficient, as you point out, because of overfitting. Given noisy data (which is al
926.
Ockham's Razor is Dull(apperceptual.wordpress.com)
10 points by neilc 18y ago|6 comments
927.
by neilc 18y ago
Yeah, same here -- learning how to nap would be valuable, but I just can't seem to do it (perhaps because I'm usually wired on caffeine?). Sometimes I'll pass out from exhaustion when I get home from a long day, but that is more involuntary
928.
by neilc 18y ago
Furthermore, you've only got to find one example where P=NP and you can reduce many other problems to this case Except that the answer is quite likely P != NP. Rather than characterizing the rewards in financial terms, IMHO the more impor
929.
Sun servers with integrated Flash & ZFS(blogs.sun.com)
12 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments
930.
The $10,000 question(michaelnielsen.org)
2 points by neilc 18y ago|0 comments

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