terra_t

17 ms·

121.
by terra_t 16y ago
The trouble with fast breeders is that you need a huge fissile inventory to get one started. A study of the PRISM design, a modern fast breeder that uses integral reprocessing to reduce the inventory of plutonium that's sitting around, no
122.
by terra_t 16y ago
You can be depressed without realizing it. Part of you can think that you like your job, while another part of you hates it. The best way to detect burnout isn't to ask "do you feel burned out?" but to ask "can you get the work done?" I
123.
by terra_t 16y ago
Couldn't care less. Systems like Facebook depend on a dual sided market. There's nothing to read if nobody is writing, and why write if nobody is reading? I had a friend years ago who ran a multimedia-oriented site that only took open for
124.
by terra_t 16y ago
+10 I worked at one of these places, as a contractor. They never offer health insurance. They buy a lot of pizza and junk food, and give out lots of cheap praise, but will never send you to a conference or otherwise contribute to your
125.
by terra_t 16y ago
Sure, computer science students get paid a lot, relatively, when they get out of college. The trouble is that, unlike white collar professions, pay for programmers doesn't go up as they mature -- instead, it goes sideways or down.
126.
by terra_t 16y ago
Corrected Title: (HowTo (In (Write LispInterpreter) Python)) [if the title actually was LISP syntax, everybody would be programming in LISP today]
127.
by terra_t 16y ago
you can write select sum(x=1) from y; in standard SQL, Oracle, and Mysql. True == 1 in standard SQL, False == 0. Both pgsql and Microsoft SQL server define a nonstandard boolean type that requires you to add a cast or an if statement,
128.
by terra_t 16y ago
The first thing to do is to divide your revenue numbers against your page views: you get an eCPM of 22 cents per 1000 page views from adsense and 24 cents from amazon, for a total of 46 cents. That's pretty good for a programming blog, i
129.
by terra_t 16y ago
pgsql has a badly nonstandard type system (lots of SQL queries that work in Oracle & mysql don't work in pgsql.) I've still got a long list of queries that run 100x faster in mysql than pgsql
130.
by terra_t 16y ago
It's a funny thing. Very powerful and scalable parallel SQL-based RDBMS systems have been commercially available for a long time. Also, I think that scalability concerns about ACID are exaggerated: ACID doesn't reach Facebook or Amazon s
131.
by terra_t 16y ago
I've worked in job shops that do web sites for smaller businesses and I'll tell ya that it's a rough business. If you're lucky you'll get to mess with a lot of new technology, and even meet some really cool clients, but sooner or later yo
132.
by terra_t 16y ago
It's up to the particular business. Some people believe in the hyperlean "Four Hour Workweek" theory where you ought to be as scarce as possible. Some businesses are about building a community. Particularly if you're looking for customer o
133.
by terra_t 16y ago
I'm coming at it from a technical background, but something that excites me from a business perspective is developing a business system that is able to efficiently execute plans in a certain space. However, just as I'm about to do that,
134.
by terra_t 16y ago
Actually this is the biggest problem that the internet faces now. The number of quality signals that people send is much less than the amount of content that's out there -- one consequence is that it's easy to "game the system." Hardly any
135.
by terra_t 16y ago
+100 This also applies to the 'entrepreneurs' who hang around, wanting to make it big but lacking any ideas about anything useful they could do.
136.
by terra_t 16y ago
my experience is that non-profits are just as niggardly as ordinary businesses are, if not more so, but there's no incentive for the organization or its employees to do any better... nothing ever has an upside.
137.
by terra_t 16y ago
How much you make on ads depends on your site, your audience, and all that. Looking at quite a few sites, I see results that are counterintuitive: for instance, you can make more money running ads on a Chevy forum than you can on a Cad
138.
by terra_t 16y ago
the basic practice of SEO is "search engine compatibility". many sites do things with sessions, frames, javascript and such that are effectively a "romulan cloaking device" so far as Google is concerned. Then they wonder why they don't s
139.
by terra_t 16y ago
Why didn't the official bittorrent client run on Red Hat Linux (w/o downgrading your Python) for at least three years? Why was NLTK stuck on Python 2.4 for years? I might use Python to use NLTK, but why do I have to choose an old Python t
140.
by terra_t 16y ago
Python brought this on itself by having no respect for compatibility between versions. There's really no such thing as the Python language, only "Python 2.2", "Python 2.4", "Python 3". If you want to run Python scripts, you need to hav
141.
The Angry Rich(nytimes.com)
61 points by terra_t 16y ago|77 comments
142.
by terra_t 16y ago
Because the secure jobs are going to go away. Customs officer? Governments will be facing increasing deficits in the future and will be looking for anything they can cut. Manager in a bank? Automation is eating the jobs of bank tellers,
143.
by terra_t 16y ago
In my neck of the woods I think the problem is a lack of software managers, not a lack of talented developers -- maybe things are different in Silicon Valley. Somebody who could do very well in an organization that manages tasks, deadline
144.
by terra_t 16y ago
Here's an old report on how 3 letter domains got snapped up at the height of the .com bubble... http://www.honeylocust.com/trigraphs/
145.
by terra_t 16y ago
The link is http://ookaboo.com/
146.
Ask HN: What would you do with free images of everything on Earth?
8 points by terra_t 16y ago|2 comments
147.
by terra_t 16y ago
you'd better get your costume ready by Oct 31 if you want to have a halloween costume. You can slip your kid's birthday party to another day before you mail out the invitations, but after that you're committed. Christmas only comes on De
148.
by terra_t 16y ago
I'm working on a semantic web related startup and I've lavishing a lot of attention on web interface for ordinary (non-mobile) web browsers. At some point I think I want a mobile app and I'd ~seriously~ think about outsourcing that.
149.
by terra_t 16y ago
If I've got any responsibility for the management of a project (and that includes putting tickets in an issue tracking system and resolving them), I ask the question of "What happens if we miss this deadline?" I usually ask this question a
150.
by terra_t 16y ago
I thought this was all just a scam to turn off TweetAdder, or at least force TweetAdder off the API.

More ›