neilc

26 ms·

211.
by neilc 16y ago
Say what you will about Digg, but at least they rolled out new software. Digg is a discussion site, not an operating system -- what is the value in "rolling out new software"? Digg's value is in the quality of the discussion and community
212.
by neilc 16y ago
Keep in mind that there are already millions of lines of code running in modern cars. The worst-case failure mode of all that code would certainly result in loss of life, and legal liability on the part of the manufacturer/insurer/etc. So r
213.
by neilc 16y ago
The SF Bay Area is a beautiful place to live; Silicon Valley itself is mostly an ugly collection of office parks and suburban sprawl.
214.
by neilc 16y ago
I don't think my sentiments are "assinine", thank you :) The FBI has legitimate reasons to want to intercept communications, e.g., to try to prevent organized crime and domestic terrorism. While most people would probably support the FBI's
215.
by neilc 16y ago
The FBI have a legitimate cause for concern: if strong cryptography ever becomes foolproof and widespread, it will make intercepting communications much, much harder -- and there are legitimate reasons for why the FBI would want to intercep
216.
by neilc 16y ago
Not to be a grouch, but most of this seems puerile and borderline irresponsible to me. Source code should be concise and beautiful, not a repository for unfunny attempts at humor by programmers.
217.
by neilc 16y ago
Mr. Phillips != Mr. Hurd -- the question is whether Hurd had an affair, not Phillips.
218.
by neilc 16y ago
Optimizing to improve cache behavior can still be fairly tricky / counter-intuitive.
219.
by neilc 16y ago
I just use LaTeX-Mk or a similar package, which takes care of multiple runs of LaTeX fairly well. http://latex-mk.sourceforge.net/
220.
by neilc 16y ago
To what end does a university president raise money? Erm, well, it differs, but in general they are raising money for either new projects or the general endowment. Income from the endowment is typically used to support a wide variety of are
221.
The PostgreSQL Development Process(lets.postgresql.jp)
2 points by neilc 16y ago|0 comments
222.
by neilc 16y ago
It's entirely possible that you have servers that are at 80-90% ATR all the time I'd be curious if you have any evidence that this occurs in practice. Even a busy server with clients of uniform + low latency, intuitively I'd expect fairly
223.
by neilc 16y ago
It's not a "justification": the pay of instructors and the pay of university presidents are just two very different things. I don't really see what the point of comparing the two is. Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its
224.
by neilc 16y ago
the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contri
225.
by neilc 16y ago
To get things started, this HN thread from a few months ago has some good suggestions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226736 As does Derek Sivers' book list: http://sivers.org/book
226.
Ask HN: Summer Reading Recommendations?
61 points by neilc 16y ago|94 comments
227.
by neilc 16y ago
there is more money flowing in Quebec than anywhere else in Canada I'm curious what you mean by this (and if you have any evidence) -- VC deal flow, overall economic activity, or what? The impression I've got from others about Montreal's
228.
by neilc 16y ago
The easy way to check that is to get your level of vitamin D (25-OHD in a blood test) tested by your doctor.
229.
A Retrospective on SEDA(matt-welsh.blogspot.com)
2 points by neilc 16y ago|0 comments
230.
by neilc 16y ago
isn't INT_MAX the largest value that could be returned? From the article: "... assuming C to have integral types that can hold arbitrarily large integers." As far as Pi, there are various well-known proofs that the length of the decimal e
231.
by neilc 16y ago
I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic The NIC is not the most interesting part, but the network is: not only do these new instances offer 10 GigE, but they also offer full bisection bandwidth to all instances in a placement g
232.
by neilc 16y ago
I'm interested. Berkeley / North Oakland preferred, but anywhere nearby would be fine.
233.
by neilc 16y ago
And there are also enough 'prominent examples' for impure imperative languages. For instance, OpenMP makes parallelizing some loops in C/C++ a walk in the park, and I have parallelized some of my programs by adding only a few pragmas. I'm
234.
by neilc 16y ago
Khat usage is ubiquitous in certain parts of Africa (e.g., Yemen and Somalia). It's not really in the same class as harder drugs though. I've seen some reports that people grind up and smoke anti-retroviral medication for HIV ( http://news.
235.
Guinea-Bissau: The Cocaine Coast(vqronline.org)
17 points by neilc 16y ago|12 comments
236.
by neilc 16y ago
It may be true that FP does make concurrency easier, but I don't think this has been demonstrated to be generally true yet Perhaps not generally true, but I think MapReduce and LINQ are two prominent examples of how a "functional programm
237.
by neilc 16y ago
That seems like precisely the wrong lesson to draw from this experience.
238.
by neilc 16y ago
Yes, I am aware of who he is. Why is his divorce any more interesting because of the companies he has founded?
239.
by neilc 16y ago
Why is this on HN, and the top story no less? Gossip about celebrities is boring, even if the celebrity happens to be a famous geek. I'm not one to bitch about off-topic stories, but I'm genuinely curious why people find this story to be in
240.
by neilc 16y ago
... but only for the relatively ancient and poorly performing SSD that Apple ships with the MacBook Air. Whether the results generalize to other SSDs, or the reason for why there's no major performance degradation, are both open questions.

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