pcowans

10 ms·

31.
by pcowans 14y ago
Soul of a New Machine is one of my all time favourite books - a definite must read for anyone who cares about how technology gets created.
32.
by pcowans 14y ago
Super-obvious answer here, but if you only have one of something you can't upgrade things, reboot, etc., without downtime, and you have a single point of failure if things go wrong. Having N+1 of each component, ideally with automated failo
33.
by pcowans 14y ago
I used to live close to this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Colchester) - it's actually very easy to do, and is really nothing more than a road that happens to run in a loop and has 5 small roundabouts on it. The junc
34.
by pcowans 14y ago
This is maybe a bit more encouraging though: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet...
35.
by pcowans 14y ago
Interestingly, some trains (on the London-Cambridge line for example) now have posters with hashtags for use during delays in the carriages.
36.
by pcowans 14y ago
Just a couple of observations based on experience: - You'll most likely run out of power well before you run out of physical rack space. - You'll (hopefully) spend less time in the data centre than you think, especially if you have good lig
37.
by pcowans 15y ago
It also could be simply a function of the demographics of HN readers.
38.
by pcowans 15y ago
I'll also add a link to the Google Solve For X talk from Mike Cheiky / Cool Planet, as it's relevant here and pretty interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYVlZ9v_0o
39.
by pcowans 15y ago
Starting from the other end of things, it clearly is possible to synthesise organic compounds from atmospheric concentrations of CO2 as nature does it already, the question is what sort of yield you can get. My understanding is that using a
40.
by pcowans 15y ago
I should also add that addressing performance issues with caching can seriously impact the maintainability of your application, particularly if you end up with complex cache expiry rules and/or systems to pre-populate cache entries. I'd def
41.
by pcowans 15y ago
From experience I have to agree with both parts of this - it can be very slow and it's generally not that easy to profile, e.g. the call graph tends to get very complex and therefore difficult to interpret, and as you say, GC can be a big p
42.
by pcowans 15y ago
Tellurium's not a rare earth element though. It is currently produced only in very small quantities, but my understanding is we just don't know much about how much of it's available due to the fact that we didn't really use it for anything
43.
by pcowans 15y ago
Then we'll do more programming - I'm sure we've not run out of problems that can be solved through software.
44.
by pcowans 15y ago
Sure, although I think in this case it might be the lesser of two evils. It would definitely be nice to see the private sector funding job creation, but if they're not going to do it it's probably worth getting the government involved.
45.
by pcowans 15y ago
I'm not sure that's true - it's definitely not true when you have limited funding and aren't profitable yet, but for the most part the tech world moves on and products have a finite, and generally pretty short, lifetime.
46.
by pcowans 15y ago
I disagree - I'm not an economist, but certainly here in the UK there's a lot of talk about access to credit being a significant limiting factor. Hence the government's 'credit easing' program, which is aimed at lending directly to business
47.
by pcowans 15y ago
Also worth looking at the historical data in http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_4.pdf . That shows that this was also the case briefly in the late 90s, and consistently before about 1990.
48.
by pcowans 15y ago
For the sake of comparison, per capita energy consumption in the US (for 2003, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_con... ) is 10,381.2W, or around 91,000kWh/yr, so the example of 446kWh/yr in the article correspo
49.
by pcowans 16y ago
Something targeted at encouraging a strong hacker community around the OS - most likely lowering the barrier to entry for non-professional developers to build and distribute simple tools which add functionality in creative ways. Microsoft's
50.
by pcowans 16y ago
I think you're confusing robots.txt with the nofollow attribute value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
51.
by pcowans 16y ago
Songkick in London, UK See http://www.songkick.com/info/jobs#systems_engineer for details. If you're interested, drop us a line at joinsongkick@songkick.com.
52.
by pcowans 16y ago
More someone who can run testing in a way which fits well with agile development, rather than simply verifying functionality once development is largely complete. In our case this means working closely with developers, product owners etc. e
53.
by pcowans 16y ago
London, UK: Songkick (YC07) is looking for a Systems Engineer and an Agile Tester. In both cases we're looking for someone who can work on-site with the rest of our team. See http://www.songkick.com/info/jobs for details, and contact join
54.
by pcowans 16y ago
Yep, I'd definitely look into making this a platform.
55.
by pcowans 16y ago
Sounds good. It might be worth thinking about whether something closer to the HN/Reddit/Digg model might make more sense, i.e. 'Best of' being the default option, possibly with tweaks so that new posts get enough exposure to be upvoted.
56.
by pcowans 16y ago
I'm expecting to be able to sort the entries by score, but can't obviously see how to do that. Do I need to post an entry before I get that option? I've spent a total of around 12 hours in NY in my life, so don't really feel qualified :-) A
57.
by pcowans 16y ago
I can't really see you getting a lot of useful advice unless you're able to give details of the product and market. Any branding decisions are going to be completely dependent on those factors.
58.
by pcowans 16y ago
I'd agree with this. Pick something you already use and fix or extend it in ways which make a meaningful difference to you, but be aware of and respect the design goals of the original authors. In practical terms, you can just start hacking
59.
by pcowans 16y ago
I'll be there.
60.
by pcowans 18y ago
Rails running on vanilla Ruby does have particular scaling issues due to the limitations of the Ruby garbage collector. You hit a GC cycle after every 8MB of allocation, which typically takes around 150ms to run, so can dominate the runtime

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