njm

5 ms·

1.
by njm 15y ago
By being made more dense the Earth would shrink, so it is very reasonable to promote the Moon to planethood according to that definition.
2.
by njm 16y ago
I would suspect the poster has already weighed the cost vs. benefit of writing efficient code. Many domains do require careful attention to performance.
3.
by njm 16y ago
This is exactly what I've been looking for! Thank you.
4.
by njm 16y ago
For most American dialects, the sounds are nearly identical, but not quite: at the beginning of a syllable, the "r" is an approximant (a type of consonant that starts with an emphasized vowel sound), rather like "y" or "w", whereas at the e
5.
by njm 17y ago
It's not as much data as one might think, especially if you store the deltas -- there's not that much variation between individuals. That fact has actually been exploited to a great extent in enabling the $1,000 genome.
6.
by njm 17y ago
One can easily estimate the cost of a query in a relational database via EXPLAIN. What relational databases do is decouple such implementation details from semantics, enabling higher levels of abstraction and therefore reasoning. Similarly
7.
by njm 17y ago
Sure, I suppose it matters a lot on the type of Web application you're building. If you have a relatively simple domain model with very few relationships, I'm sure a KVS works pretty well. Still, for anything other than applications with
8.
by njm 17y ago
What bothers me most about the NoSQL movement is that it seems to be in conflict with a central tenet of our community: to avoid premature optimization, especially when at the expense of of expressiveness or correctness. While normalized re
9.
by njm 17y ago
Not just uninformative, but misleading too: there are many relational query languages besides SQL (e.g. Tutorial D). Is the conference about non-relational database technologies, or any alternative to SQL?
10.
by njm 17y ago
Am I missing something here? If a microgram is 10^-6 gram and a kilogram is 10^3 grams...
11.
by njm 17y ago
This is generally the case across the physical and life sciences too. Even "revolutionary" fields like epigenetics and genomics are effectively refinements and extensions of the pioneering work done in molecular biology during the 1960s an
12.
by njm 17y ago
My rule of thumb: I only import things locally (i.e. within a function) if it is a conditional dependency. This is particularly true if it's something not from the standard library. Example: I might have an application that supports multi
13.
by njm 17y ago
eru nailed it. We lived off bulk everything -- oatmeal, rice, beans. For fresh food, we got cheap veggies with lots of nutrition; greens tend to be the best bang for the buck, but also bags of carrots, beets, and such. For protein, it wa
14.
by njm 17y ago
Why on earth aren't beans subsidized instead of corn? Among other things, this would cut down immensely on the amount of fertilizer consumed per year.
15.
by njm 17y ago
While this is true in general, it is still possible to eat a balanced, healthy diet for very little money. That said, it requires a lot of discipline and a somewhat sophisticated understanding of nutrition. Still, my wife and I managed to
16.
by njm 17y ago
It's not that SQL queries are difficult to compose, it's that ORMs enable different abstractions to emerge, at least when used appropriately; I'll admit though that junior developers are drawn most to ORMs because they limit exposure to SQL
17.
by njm 17y ago
I personally advocate a two-pronged approach, where DOM manipulation is done via jQuery (at which it excels), but abstractions are built up via classes (pick your favorite implementation). This avoids overextending either paradigm.
18.
by njm 17y ago
It seems to me (an avid jQuery user, no less) that people are stretching the paradigm too far. There are places where traditional, class-like abstractions are perfectly legitimate, and indeed more natural. Some of the more elaborate appli
19.
by njm 18y ago
Pumpkin seeds are mentioned, but pumpkins themselves are fantastic as well -- they make for some really great soups. Also, I'm certainly not one to knock coffee, but tea is much better in terms of bang for the buck. I buy loose-leaf jasmin
20.
by njm 18y ago
Quick question, if you'll indulge: where do you find those CDS numbers you mentioned?
21.
by njm 18y ago
I'd actually argue the best approach is to develop both sides fully: I agree that an OO data model is the best fit for non-trivial application logic, but I also believe relational databases make the best data stores. The two can coexist ju
22.
by njm 18y ago
Would you argue that the ability to form ad hoc queries for answering questions not originally imagined when writing an application fails to make the relational model superior to something without that property? (I see you develop with Rail
23.
by njm 18y ago
Sigh. There is so much misinformation being spread by today's software engineers without proper CS backgrounds. As anybody who's read Date and friends knows, relational databases are fundamentally more expressive (and therefore better) th
24.
by njm 18y ago
Please, go back to reddit.