russell

93 ms·

751.
by russell 17y ago
Firebug. Without it, I would be working blind. Developer tools when I have to got to IE.
752.
by russell 17y ago
Back in the late 70's or early 80's I was leading a group that did compilers and assemblers for the microprocessor group. We had a problem with one of the compilers from Microsoft. I called up technical support and got Paul Allen on the l
753.
by russell 17y ago
We were dealing with terabytes of data and 10's of billions of writes per month. Most tables had 4 to 6 indexes, resulting in multiple updates for each write. If your data sets and indexes are huge there is little locality of data. Each
754.
by russell 17y ago
Dingwall lumps a number of separate issues under "soft delete": undo, audit trails, soft create, and performance in the presence of historical data. He presents several solutions, not all of which I would buy. The is_deleted column is a pr
755.
by russell 17y ago
It's an excellent cookbook of useful SQL queries with well written explanations. I've used SQL for decades, but after reading a few articles, it was obvious that I could learn some new tricks. The articles are bite sized an tasty.
756.
by russell 17y ago
Things are bad here with the DCMA, but things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel. Charlie Stross, a UK SF writer, ha
757.
by russell 17y ago
I once applied for a job and got an email questionnaire back. On of the questions was, "Given 9 balls, one of which is heavier than he others, what is the minimum number of weighings to find the heavy ball? Write an algorithm." I wrote ba
758.
by russell 17y ago
The introductory comments are an excellent read about the pragmatics of good hash table design. It would have been really helpful a couple of decades back when I was routinely implementing custom hash tables. OTOH tuning the probe paramet
759.
by russell 17y ago
My GF always does better with salesmen than me. A year or two back I bought her a 32 bit Dell with dual processors, a middling graphics card, and 4G of ram. She didnt like it because it was too underpowered. She sent it back and negotiat
760.
by russell 17y ago
> I wonder if it will spread ... Nope. The irregular forms are slowly disappearing, the least frequent first. I would give you a citation, but I am supposed to be cleaning out the basement, not surfing HN.
761.
by russell 17y ago
My first was an IBM 7094, but over in a corner was a trusty 1401 which was used to copy card decks of programs onto tape for the 7094 to execute. The output tapes were carried back to the 1401 for printing. The 1401 was a marvel of simplic
762.
by russell 17y ago
I agree that signup should be painless, maybe just an email and verification, but I disagree with the short trial period. Maybe if your application is really trivial, one or two visits will work, but if it takes a while for the value to un
763.
by russell 17y ago
The first amendment to the US Constitution pretty much covers that. There isn't anything much than the government deciding what is true and what isn't, what can be said and what cannot.
764.
by russell 17y ago
He was quoting Fernando Corbato who was comparing lines of assembly to lines of PL/I in large projects. Corbato later recalls this in an article in Byte. Crobato's Law is mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_J._Corbat%C3%B3
765.
by russell 17y ago
Slide 25: "Most Metrics' values increase with code size". The point about non-linear increase in defects is my (unwarranted) extrapolation. An earlier slide quotes a 25% increase in complexity gives a 100% increase in size. No, it really
766.
by russell 17y ago
I have a client that is in the business of supplying equipment to studios in Hollywood, very high end equipment. The offices are tricked out to impress studio executives. The employee kitchen id full of SubZero refrigerators, commercial r
767.
by russell 17y ago
I second that. A decade ago my son was looking into schools. None of the ones in the poll were on his list, but CMU, Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford from yours were. He also looked at Washington and Harvey Mudd, and ended up going to Berkele
768.
by russell 17y ago
A couple of points buried in the talk: defects increase as the code size increases. The increase is greater than linear. So my question for folks is why would you program in Java rather than Python, where you are guaranteed to have more b
769.
by russell 17y ago
I second the notion of a front-end like CFront. It's a fun exercise. It took me about a week to do a Pascal to C translator a couple of decades ago. One problem is that the grammar for C is not context free. If you are using a top down
770.
by russell 17y ago
Alert: spoiler ahead. First you have to get beyond the abstract and 10 pages of dense material. The answer is 10^10^10^7, which is a pretty big number, even bigger that the 10^500 from string theory. Then they start applying simplificatio
771.
by russell 17y ago
This is also an issue of vendor lock-in. If a web site wants to move from one web analytics company to another, it has to redo the tags on every page. I can't comment on jshub's offering, but the general idea is a good one.
772.
by russell 17y ago
I make my living doing Java web development, but I wouldnt use it for any personal project. Struts, Hibernate, String are all too heavyweight for a personal project with too much of a learning curve. I believe that productivity is much lo
773.
by russell 17y ago
In general, hardware optimized for high-level languages have been a failure, usually the extra baggage for handling things as machine-level interpreter slow things down nearly as much as a software interpreter. Nothing has been a real comm
774.
by russell 17y ago
I remember reading that both sexes prefer less hair, but that testosterone keeps men hairy. Probably googling for a recent "naked ape" article would get it for you.
775.
by russell 17y ago
Does anyone have a good tool for jotting down ideas and rearranging them? I find that word processors are not very good for this, because they are more concerned with formatting than manipulating units of text. Simplicity is paramount.
776.
by russell 17y ago
ClearCase: I hated it because it was used by management to micromanage the workflow. Too big and cumbersome. (circa 2000.) JIRA: too heavyweight. More options than you would ever want. FogBugz: the client picked it because it could be use
777.
by russell 17y ago
What he is really arguing for is more redundancy in programming. Strong typing (he really means static typing), so you can type (with your fingers) thing more than once and you can put constraint enforcing wrappers around your values. Asse
778.
by russell 17y ago
Since Windows 7 requires XP users to backup everything, reformat our disks, reinstall all our applications from CDs, and apply all patches, I think I'll pass. Maybe I should finally pass on MS completely.
779.
by russell 17y ago
IIRC that's what C++ does and I recently read that it's mostly ignored. Of course a compiler or IDE could detect what is caught and generate the javadoc equivalent. That would be useful.
780.
by russell 17y ago
By "immediately", I meant as you write the code. Type the code, hit return, and you have an error. "Immediately" you have to decide add a try or change the method signature. I think this causes premature exception handling, just because

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