neilc

21 ms·

151.
by neilc 15y ago
The HN title is inaccurate. The article's claim is: The researchers found that 68 percent of the sons of top-percentile income earners have at some point by the time they're age 33 taken a job at a firm their father also worked. The stati
152.
by neilc 15y ago
I'm not sure why you'd assume that. CMU's campus in Silicon Valley is very different than the primary CMU campus, for example.
153.
by neilc 15y ago
> Because fuck you, that's why. No: The round of new charges stems from a rule, which takes effect on Saturday, that limits the fees that banks can levy on merchants every time a consumer uses a debit card to make a purchase. Given th
154.
by neilc 15y ago
They imply that looking at crime data reduces average wait time, but they don't actually present any data to show that this is the case, or to quantify how much better their demand prediction model can do when given access to the crime data
155.
by neilc 15y ago
I think this approach makes sense only if the acquired engineers stay at Google (and are significantly more productive than the average talent Google can acquire through less expensive channels). I suspect that many of the folks working for
156.
by neilc 15y ago
Awesome! Thanks for the information.
157.
by neilc 15y ago
Cool -- I'd never heard of ripper before (Googling for it doesn't produce much information either). Can you comment on the differences/advantages of ripper, compared with RubyParser? For my use case I just want to get a sensible AST from so
158.
45 Days(pixelatedimage.com)
2 points by neilc 15y ago|0 comments
159.
by neilc 15y ago
Color had a very talented team attempting to attack multiple technically challenging problems, that remain unsolved today. Sure -- so what? Just because you've got some smart folks trying to solve hard problems doesn't mean you're worth $
160.
by neilc 15y ago
An exception to this is library code, which should typically check for malloc failures and return an error to the client code.
161.
by neilc 15y ago
> Those aren't small costs. No, but they are largely fixed costs, not marginal ones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
162.
Yahoo launching HortonWorks, Hadoop spinoff company(gigaom.com)
46 points by neilc 15y ago|5 comments
163.
by neilc 15y ago
If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff. Personally I think t
164.
by neilc 15y ago
Opening down or trading below what the stock priced at in the short term has a strong stigma attached to it and can make retail and institutional investors think there is something systemically wrong with the company regardless of the fund
165.
by neilc 15y ago
Longhorn reputedly was attempted in C# and MS had to fall back to C for performance and reliability reasons. That is not the case, as far as I know (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista ). MS have written at
166.
by neilc 15y ago
A "superstar programmer" that doesn't "write clean, readable code, with comments, error checks, clear log messages, and tests" is simply not a "superstar programmer."
167.
by neilc 15y ago
Arena or pool memory allocation is a very old idea, and has been implemented by many different systems (e.g., Apache/APR, PostgreSQL, lcc).
168.
by neilc 16y ago
I'm aware of the language, but we haven't looked at it in any depth. If you think it would make for a good host language for Bloom, I'd be curious to hear your reasoning.
169.
by neilc 16y ago
This project appears to be a Ruby DSL with aspirations to be its own language someday Well, we actually started with our own language a few years ago (a Datalog variant), and have been exploring embeddings into traditional languages as a
170.
by neilc 16y ago
Why is the press so ignorant of basic statistics? It is really depressing. I wonder if reporters actually don't understand the difference between correlation and causation, or if they just willfully ignore it because it makes for catchier h
171.
by neilc 16y ago
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
172.
by neilc 16y ago
reflect on the fact that what you are looking at is the very best product that a $75 billion software company, one famous for allegedly only hiring A-list talent, was able to build. Except that it isn't the "very best product ... FB was a
173.
by neilc 16y ago
You cannot attract a mass of users, give them a nice UX, build a community - and then one day throw ads all over to place, call it a monetization strategy and keep a straight face. Really? Google did essentially that to great success, as
174.
by neilc 16y ago
Assuming the IPv4 TTL issue can be worked around (see elsewhere in thread), a phone that does GBs/month of encrypted traffic over SSH would still be a signal that something suspicious is going on.
175.
by neilc 16y ago
FWIW, Safari 5.0.3 was used for the competition. Besides, if most competitors arrive at the competition with carefully-researched exploits available to use, I'm not sure this sort of last-minute patching would make much difference, even if
176.
by neilc 16y ago
Per http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De... : "As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The
177.
by neilc 16y ago
I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuis
178.
by neilc 16y ago
Almost all the non-techies I know have the WiFi iPad, not the 3G version. I'm not sure of the exact sales figures, but I would expect the WiFi iPad is much more popular. Effectively the XOOM is competing against something that costs $500, n
179.
by neilc 16y ago
In the Bay Area and a few other places, you're absolutely right -- but there are other places where $100k for a software engineer is pretty generous pay. Of course, the cost of living in those places is typically a lot less than in the Bay
180.
by neilc 16y ago
Specializing in "open source" seems like a strange choice: open source is a business model / licensing decision. I think it would make a lot more sense to specialize in a vertical industry (e.g., biotech, hardware, robotics, etc.)

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