rbranson

66 ms·

661.
by rbranson 16y ago
Factories are nothing like software development: factories are repetitive assembly lines and software development is a creative process. When talent concentrates like it does in SF and NY, it creates a culture that becomes more valuable tha
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Ask HN: What do you think of "Peak Oil?"
12 points by rbranson 16y ago|30 comments
663.
by rbranson 16y ago
I believe your conclusion is rooted in a lack of experience in writing C code. You seem to think that developers are going to go out of their way to allocate and initialize the struct manually. In almost every codebase I've worked in, struc
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by rbranson 16y ago
Working for any primarily software driven company is going to be challenging. Working in an expensed IT department is what most developers do, and the work is pretty pedestrian. This seems to provide the most clear line of delineation in so
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by rbranson 16y ago
I certainly hope so. The entitlement mentality of most boomers and their children is shocking to me sometimes.
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by rbranson 16y ago
If you consider any donation to a non-profit as charity, then sure. The article you linked uses a very loose definition of charity: any discretionary income received by non-profit entities. This covers pretty much all donations given to rel
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by rbranson 16y ago
So you create a typedef struct of date_range to store the start_date and end_date and use a set of date_range_* functions to manipulate that struct. Most OOP languages allow direct access to even private variables if the developer really wa
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by rbranson 16y ago
I think what you're talking about for type-safety, not necessarily OOP. C supports types, but is not completely type-safe. It will tell the developer that they shouldn't be doing something, but won't enforce it. The argument above is that m
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by rbranson 16y ago
There aren't enough rich people to sustain the suburbs. I think what these people are talking about is the suburban middle-class entitlement mentality. The vast majority of middle-class americans live in suburbs and subscribe to the philoso
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by rbranson 16y ago
From the article: "...classified computers are often disconnected from the network, or are in low-bandwidth areas ."
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by rbranson 16y ago
... and I still love C. There's something utterly minimalist and carnal about C. The best part is how it's several orders of magnitude more productive than writing assembly code, all the while 99% as powerful and performant.
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by rbranson 16y ago
I think it's pretty damning to the military that they have such huge issues with their secret data. Relatively pedestrian measures required by standards like PCI-DSS could increase the security of these systems many-fold.
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by rbranson 16y ago
If they needed to use a sneakernet because of a low bandwidth link, it seems like they could eventually migrate to a system with the ability to transfer encrypted copies to removable media. Any other trusted computer on the network could do
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by rbranson 16y ago
I think this is largely because of the overwhelming number of fundamentalists in the Republican party. When there are polling figures like 46% of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim and 67% believe he's a socialist, this picture starts to
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by rbranson 16y ago
The problem with comparing AWS to SalesForce is that SalesForces' prices are negotiable, often with very deep volume discounts. AWS pricing is completely upfront, which I prefer, but... just sayin'
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by rbranson 16y ago
If you're curious how SalesForce is pulling this off from an architectural point of view, check this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZZDI18opk It's mostly built on Oracle RAC.
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by rbranson 16y ago
Cassandra has it's own hurdles, but I think if we're talking about getting your mind in the right place, it might be a better answer. Cassandra definitely has a much more mature scalability implementation that isn't caveat-ridden like Mongo
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by rbranson 16y ago
I am starting to believe that we both essentially believe mostly the same points, but we're using different nomenclature. You stated previously that most of these real-world, high-scalability, high-availability systems use ACID databases as
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by rbranson 16y ago
I wasn't saying banks should use Dynamo, but that Dynamo-style consistency is appropriate for conducting e-commerce transactions, and originally that most scaled industries don't depend on ACID semantics in their core datastores. Bank accou
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by rbranson 16y ago
It's not as "hands-free" as you'd like to believe. Check out the MongoDB sharding introduction[1]. There are some pretty big caveats. Very few people are using auto-sharding at scale in production (bit.ly and BoxedIce are all I know of). Th
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by rbranson 16y ago
MongoDB is designed specifically for multi-server durability. All writes are done in-place. It will support single-server durability in 1.8. Until then, 10gen strongly recommends against using a single-server setup with any data you care ab
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by rbranson 16y ago
Please ask yourself why. In reality, MongoDB has almost all of the same limitations of MySQL and PostgreSQL, but lacks the production proven record. In addition, MongoDB has very weak durability guarantees on a single server, poor performan
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by rbranson 16y ago
Had the same experience with Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant on a project. We had hundreds of millions of small records to store, and TCH could pack it into space fall enough to fit into disk cache on an XL EC2 instance.
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by rbranson 16y ago
Dynamo's consistency ranges from fully consistent to loosely consistent and is tunable on a per-application and per-call basis. This means a write can be reconciled against 100% of the replicas before it is considered finished. How is this
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by rbranson 16y ago
How common is this, really, though? It's pretty rare that someone actually converts an existing single disk setup into a RAID. It's far more common to add/remove/replace devices in an existing array. These tasks have always been fairly triv
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by rbranson 16y ago
EDIT: For full disclosure purposes, the parent post is from John Hugg, a software engineer at VoltDB, which is a high-scale data store that competes with many "NoSQL" databases. I am not claiming his point of view is invalid, just that it c
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by rbranson 16y ago
Electronic banking systems are far from ACID (think ATM operations, check and credit card transfer processes). Stock exchanges aren't ACID. Amazon.com isn't ACID. Logistics systems (FedEx, UPS, etc) aren't ACID. In fact, if you look at the
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by rbranson 16y ago
Low, middle, and high-income people alike already DO commute from outside the city. The NYC metro area has extensive and expensive transit infrastructure that is constantly expanding. Cost of construction and infrastructure increases with d
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by rbranson 16y ago
Sounds simple, but apparently you don't understand NY construction projects... the devil is in the details: 1. Good luck. Brownstones in Manhattan are pretty rare these days, and they're quite expensive, largely because you'll be finding th
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by rbranson 16y ago
Comparing NYC to Beverly Hills is apples and oranges. The only likeness they share is, perhaps, that they are both independent municipalities. Exhibit A, NYC: The most populous city in the US with the highest density and having the highest

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