neilc

142 ms·

1291.
by neilc 19y ago
That's an interesting idea -- I would imagine that there's a lot of commonality between the legal paperwork you need for most early-stage startups, and when differences exist, they can often be parameterized reasonably well ("$a founders, $
1292.
by neilc 19y ago
I suggest that "those folks" don't have a clue, at least if their quoted response is any indication. Git is plainly "suited for large projects" (if the kernel qualifies as large), and I'm mystified as to why they think the "database" is unr
1293.
by neilc 19y ago
Yeah, I think that is precisely the problem with C++. The language lets you do some amazing things, but it is just way too complicated. Unless you've spent a long time becoming an expert at the language, it is all too easy to write C++
1294.
by neilc 19y ago
According to http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com... : "The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so airlines of the
1295.
by neilc 19y ago
In general, combining multiple packages that each attempt to perform concurrent operations is error prone, especially if they use locking. The STM papers make an interesting argument for why using transactions rather than locks as the typic
1296.
by neilc 19y ago
Personally I didn't get very much useful out of AoS. As others have mentioned, most of the advice was simply common sense, at least if you've already read PG's essays. I also found the writing style to be annoying and gimmicky -- one "top 5
1297.
by neilc 19y ago
Wait, a site called "Startup News" that is focused on startups?! Surely not! (That said, more submissions on CS and the technology behind many startups wouldn't be unwelcome, at least to me.)
1298.
by neilc 19y ago
I'd be interested, but not for a little while: I just signed a 6 month lease (so I could move in at the beginning of January). I moved out to the Bay Area to work for a startup a few weeks ago, but I've been planning to try and find a place
1299.
by neilc 19y ago
I think there are many examples. A lot of my personal background is in database systems: off the top of my head, non-consumer oriented startups in that domain include startups that are trying to beat Oracle at transaction-processing (Enterp
1300.
by neilc 19y ago
Familarity with social networks and the latest Internet fads is definitely an advantage for people considering consumer -oriented Internet startups, but those aren't all the startups out there. Heck, consumer-oriented, "Web 2.0", advertisi
1301.
by neilc 19y ago
I don't see how it breaks any design rules: the UI is essentially the same (and completely functional) without JS. Admittedly, I don't really see a compelling reason why you'd need JS to add that link bar, but the redesigned Google page h
1302.
by neilc 20y ago
Actually, plenty of people at Microsoft know Lisp.
1303.
by neilc 20y ago
Another reason to not use a DBMS for a search engine is that typical implementations of transaction-oriented SQL databases are a terrible fit for the performance requirements of a search engine. For example, search engines don't need conc
1304.
by neilc 20y ago
http://madeleine.rubyforge.org/ is a Ruby implementation of similar ideas, I believe.
1305.
by neilc 20y ago
Off the top of my head, I'd think that the UI would be of secondary importance in any startup that is writing systems software: if you can solve an important business problem, a fancy demo is impressive (and important!), but the basic probl
1306.
by neilc 20y ago
I think that completely depends on the startup. There are broad classes of startups in which UI design is not relevant, or at best a secondary concern that can be handled by a single member of the team.
1307.
by neilc 20y ago
However, it is quite out of date: for example, PostgreSQL has had a native Win32 port for several years, and the "--enable-locale" / "--enable-multibyte" configure options have not been necessary (or supported) for even longer. "Large row"
1308.
by neilc 20y ago
Actually, pgreplicator saw its last release in 2001, and I'm not aware of anyone who uses it in production. The fact that it requires PostgreSQL 7.1 (which is ancient, buggy, and unsupported by the Postgres developers) would be a pretty big
1309.
by neilc 20y ago
"Gmail was the first most interactive web based email client which actually used the XMLHttpRequest to make a rich internet interface providing asynchronus behaviour thus making the email client more user friendly than any other in those da
1310.
by neilc 20y ago
A site that does 61,000 page views/day is by no means "high traffic", especially if you're distributing that load over 4 machines. Somewhat interesting post, but this is still a pretty limited demonstration of rails scalability.