pjungwir

80 ms·

691.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Writing Postgres functions in C is not nearly as scary as it sounds. Here are some stats functions I wrote for a Rails app. The histogram function in particular was the driver, since it was parameterized on bucket size/count/start
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by pjungwir 12y ago
To toot my own horn, I wrote a blog post that takes their approach and extends it to sort sibling comments by upvotes, like on HN or Reddit: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-f... It&
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by pjungwir 12y ago
These are some very nice tips! One of the things I like so much about ActiveRecord is that it plays nice with pretty much every example here, e.g. `Product.where("title ~* 'title'")` or `Product.where("title ~* ?&qu
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by pjungwir 12y ago
I was replying to this: "my best months have been ~$18K". Sorry for trying to encourage someone. You're right that $20k minimum is a lot harder, at $100/hr probably impossible. But as a peak? Last year January, July, O
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Well maybe I am working too hard. :-) But really, how many startup founders on HN are putting in 35 hour weeks? At $100/hr I don't think $20/mo is easy, but I'd say you could hit it once or twice a year. That's what
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by pjungwir 12y ago
At $100-$150/hour $20k/month ranges from doable to dependable. If you are good and experienced I don't see why you couldn't bill that as a generalist. Also, generalist-vs-specialist depends on your perspective. To your c
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Ah, thanks for clarifying! I think I overlooked the "square root" part of your original response. You're right, seeing the source code is no help at all! And it's difficult to say that a human could always say if sqrt(x)
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by pjungwir 12y ago
For real computers, yes, but we're talking about Turing machines. :-) By your logic there is no halting problem at all because every machine will eventually halt. A Turing machine has infinite tape and infinite time.
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Actually I'm asking because I'm curious whether the mind has the same limitations as a Turing machine. I really like the simplicity of your example, but it seems like it only works if you can't see the source code. If you see
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Ask HN: Are there programs whose halting status is undecidable?
6 points by pjungwir 12y ago|8 comments
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by pjungwir 12y ago
I co-founded a startup to do that for 2012, called ElectNext. It was kind of like OkCupid: We let you rate your issues, and we asked you questions, then we showed your similarity score to your candidates for President/Senate/House
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Postgres LATERAL join(illuminatedcomputing.com)
2 points by pjungwir 12y ago|0 comments
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by pjungwir 12y ago
These seem like great questions, thank you! Perhaps next time I get a chance I'll try them out. :-)
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by pjungwir 12y ago
This is totally understandable, because in many ways programming is a "market for lemons": good programmers disappear off the market, there is a high chance you'll hire a bad one, and there is severe information asymmetry bec
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by pjungwir 12y ago
For your local area, I'd look at who is sponsoring the tech events (e.g. you local Ruby/JS/iOS/etc meetup). For instance in Portland that quickly gets me New Relic, Urban Airship, and maybe a dozen other names. You can a
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by pjungwir 12y ago
> Nobody programs like that for their entire program. That's exactly how I programmed when I was learning BASIC in elementary school. :-) I still remember my friend trying in vain to explain what a FOR loop did, and I remember when
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by pjungwir 12y ago
That is really an awesome explanation, thank you! And thanks to the other commenters as well. I think my interpretation of the 2nd law as "static" (like on a TV) misleads me because static seems so uniform, and really increasing e
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Reading the comments in your [0], I'm confused about the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. In thermodynamics, I've always thought of entropy as randomness, with the 2nd law saying that eventually
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by pjungwir 12y ago
One place where I am often tempted to break the Southwest model is using Rails for an app server and Python for machine learning. I really believe Rails is a better choice for quickly building and adapting web applications, but Python beats
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Once I somehow had an /etc/hosts that said something like 127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.1.8 localhost Consequently Postgres was binding to the external IP when it should have been listening on just 127.0.0.1. I only not
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Ah, thanks! More people might use this if the author put those docs online and linked to them from the main page. I don't know docbook but it looks like styling it as HTML should be easy. Now I understand pee. I wrote something less ge
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by pjungwir 12y ago
These are cool, and I use chronic all the time. But is there any more documentation beyond this page? I can't find any, and I'd love to read more about pee and see some examples. It seems there is more documentation for the reject
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by pjungwir 12y ago
I use the `man` system. When you invoke `man` you can pass an optional leading argument indicating which "section" of man pages you want to see, e.g. `man 1 open` and `man 2 open` give different pages. You can add new sections by
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by pjungwir 12y ago
> and anyway that's more or less what a consultancy usually amounts to even at 50 staff. I recommend Managing the Professional Services Firm on HN every few months, but it's really good. In the very first few chapters he show
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by pjungwir 12y ago
That's a lot of pressure to put on you! If you are really that special an employee, you should ask yourself if there is anything that would convince you to stay. It sounds like you have a great negotiating position. Often people---espe
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Well, I'm not sure it was so different then. In my case there's a pretty good story behind it. I was working as a temp doing data entry for 1000+ page industrial catalogs, and then we ran a Perl script to generate QuarkXPress file
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by pjungwir 12y ago
I'm 37 and my first programming job after college was doing support & custom integrations for a larger product (which I wasn't allowed to change). I'd already been programming since 8 and knew BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, sh, P
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by pjungwir 12y ago
If this is to cut down on if-else code then I'd say it depends on how many if-elses you're saving. More often I see people take this approach to let end users compose rules for various actions. But this kind of thing tends to be w
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by pjungwir 12y ago
I took two years of night classes while working, then I spent another year reading Greek texts with a friend while I took Latin night classes. Then another couple years reading on my own (overlapping with the theology year), then a postbacc
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by pjungwir 12y ago
SEEKING WORK - Portland, OR or Remote I'm a polygot, full-stack developer with over 14 years experience. My specialties are Rails, Postgres, Javascript, and Chef, although I've also done some iOS and Machine Learning projects. I a

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