neilc

49 ms·

181.
by neilc 16y ago
if you like the whole metropolitan lifestyle, the Valley really cannot compete There is a ton of startup activity in SF these days, as opposed to the Valley proper. Cost of living in SF is higher than in Toronto, but not by an enormous am
182.
by neilc 16y ago
Interesting. I heard the other day that Enron implemented a somewhat similar concept in 1999: a market for bandwidth. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48732
183.
by neilc 16y ago
Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share. Management is legally obligated to act in the long-term best interests of the company; that is
184.
by neilc 16y ago
I agree that saying that hints have zero value is silly, but the blog post is just Josh's opinion. If you read the discussions on this topic on the pgsql-hackers list, you'll find a more balanced view.
185.
by neilc 16y ago
MS and Oracle also have large teams of people that work full-time on improving the optimizer. With, the handful of people with the skills and inclination to work on the Postgres optimizer don't view hints as a high priority.
186.
by neilc 16y ago
I think you could probably get hints into Postgres if you did them right (and volunteered to do the work!). Where "right" means trying to make the hints at least somewhat declarative: not "use index X for query Y", but "the values of these
187.
by neilc 16y ago
This data is basically complete crap. Most academic rankings are borderline useless, but this appears worse than average.
188.
by neilc 16y ago
Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;) You still need to pay attention to this using LaTeX -- LaTeX will (usually) insert a wider-than-normal space after a period, which isn't always correct (e.g., "Mrs.", "etc.", a
189.
by neilc 16y ago
When people argue efficiency as a compiler implementation detail that is going to get worked out, they forget about many who have fallen before them. Yes; see also http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html
190.
by neilc 16y ago
I think there are many people who, given the chance, would not do business with WikiLeaks (on the grounds that their actions are perceived to be against the US national interest and potentially putting lives in danger). So I'm not sure
191.
by neilc 16y ago
Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? 10% of people who attempt a summit die, but that does not mean that attempting a summit necessarily has a 10% chance of death. That 10% figure is not conditioned on your indi
192.
Rethinking the scientific method(newyorker.com)
59 points by neilc 16y ago|34 comments
193.
by neilc 16y ago
Note that an engineer at a startup doesn't necessarily need to focus on anything other than engineering. If your startup has 2-3 people, then sure, everyone's gotta wear multiple hats; in a startup with 10-20 people, specialization makes se
194.
by neilc 16y ago
In fact, it already does have it: LTO is supported by GCC 4.5.0, which was released in April. (Although a bunch of LTO improvements will be included in the forthcoming GCC 4.6 release.)
195.
by neilc 16y ago
I also think that a research effort with the ability to process 100% of Tweets can most likely afford to pay Processing 100% of all tweets is not actually very hard or expensive: 2000 messages/sec is small potatoes if you want to do it in
196.
by neilc 16y ago
Wow, somehow I missed this fact after 30 years of programming! Yay for sarcasm. My point is that changing the performance characteristics of the lower levels of the storage hierarchy does not necessarily mean we need to make radical chang
197.
by neilc 16y ago
If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? I'm not sure we are (other than low-level details like how the kernel does I/O scheduling and filesystem implementation detai
198.
by neilc 16y ago
[If] you're not on Urbanspoon's Rez system or on OpenTable, you may as well not even exist. Perhaps to you, but I think that attitude is rare. I think most people find a place where they'd like to eat, and then they choose the easiest way
199.
by neilc 16y ago
The are a number of issues at play here — RTT (Round Trip Time, i.e. ping/latency), window sizes, packet loss and initcwnd (TCP's initial window). Initial window size: not relevant AFAICS, I'm not talking about connection startup behavior
200.
by neilc 16y ago
Limitations of the TCP/IP protocol make it very difficult for a single application to saturate a network connection. I'm just curious, but exactly which "limitations" are those? I can believe that parallel connections help in practice (es
201.
by neilc 16y ago
That is the origin of the word, but I don't see why there is anything wrong with using it as the original poster did: "to cause great destruction or harm to" is a perfectly valid meaning of the word. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictiona
202.
by neilc 16y ago
I think Flash-on-iOS is a great example of something that geeks love to discuss, but doesn't matter in the least to normal folks. Every non-technical person I know wants an iPad; 75% of them probably don't even know what Flash is.
203.
by neilc 16y ago
Well, NeXT had ~540 employees according to Wikipedia, so I'm not sure it would really qualify as a startup. Plus one of those employees was Jobs, who was borderline recruited to come back and takeover Apple, so that is definitely an excepti
204.
by neilc 16y ago
If you really put your mind to it, sure, you could avoid learning any new programming languages. Hell, many people still make a very healthy living working with COBOL. But if you really enjoy being a software developer and want to be the be
205.
by neilc 16y ago
large corporations cannot change, except by acquiring start-ups I'd be curious to see examples of large corporations that have changed by acquiring startups.
206.
by neilc 16y ago
Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? If an Atom-based CPU consumes ~2-3 extra watts but offers marginally better performance and (more importantly) compatibility with
207.
by neilc 16y ago
Irving H. Plotkin, a senior managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers' national tax practice in Boston, says that "a company's obligation to its shareholders is to try to minimize its taxes and all costs, but to do so legally." This is
208.
by neilc 16y ago
I think he was just using it as an example that would be familiar to the audience.
209.
by neilc 16y ago
Yeah, the HN article title is inaccurate.
210.
by neilc 16y ago
Depends on the project, but for a long-running project with a large code base and many contributors (many of whom are no longer actively involved in the project), it can be very valuable. In the case of PostgreSQL, the commit history goes b

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