tom_pinckney

7 ms·

1.
Da Vinci Bridge Design Finally Proven Correct by MIT Students(cnet.com)
3 points by tom_pinckney 7y ago|0 comments
2.
For eBay, AI drives over $1B in sales per quarter(venturebeat.com)
2 points by tom_pinckney 8y ago|0 comments
3.
by tom_pinckney 9y ago
Sellers and buyers can now use eBay Authenticate to get independent confirmation that goods are as authentic. It’s starting out just focused on certain types of handbags and luxury items but expected to expand over time. https://
4.
EBay launches authentication program(google.com)
2 points by tom_pinckney 9y ago|0 comments
5.
by tom_pinckney 9y ago
Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these kinds of purchases.
6.
Reassembling Darwin's notes via hackathons(nytimes.com)
1 points by tom_pinckney 10y ago|0 comments
7.
Jimmy Wales on failure(www2.tbo.com)
8 points by tom_pinckney 17y ago|1 comments
8.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
The idea is that you'd probably trust the guy who actually sold 1,000 dresses to Macys more than the guy who just says they're a great dress manufacturer.
9.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Yeah, redis is pretty interesting. I think we'd have to add some sort of client side caching on top of it so that we're not fetching the same objects over and over. Tend to saturate our network if we don't do that. The other thing is that I
10.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Anything Stonebreaker does is interesting, but I don't know enough about VoltDB to have anything to say. Definitely curious where it goes.
11.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
memcached is a poor-man's distributed shared memory system for clusters. We've been layering on top of it to try and fix deficiencies with things like client-side caching, persistence in case memcached drops objects etc. But I was curious i
12.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
In the name of completeness, there are also great packages like OpenMPI and OpenMP. At least for my particular applications, though, there's either 1) a steep learning curve for programmers 2) language support issues 3) they're designed for
13.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Yeah I didn't mean to sound like that's ALL there is. But I was time and again surprised how often buying decisions had nothing to do with the product, company's need etc. I guess I was perhaps a little naive :)
14.
Hadoop / MapReduce alternatives for parallel computing?(tompinckney.com)
11 points by tom_pinckney 17y ago|10 comments
15.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
I vowed after my first startup never again to build an enterprise product for this reason. Plus I don't like golfing and drinking with some random guy in Omaha trying to convince him my product solves one of this top three problems.
16.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Worth checking out pysco as well http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ Though in practice I find that if performance really matters using numpy or writing a C extension module usually works out the best.
17.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Definitely want to second the advice to use EXPLAIN. MySQL has a lot of very specific limitations about when it will and will not use the available indices. It also matters how you created the indices (one index on multiple columns vs multi
18.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
I guess I just object to paying Wilson $5k to run search-and-replace for me. And I certainly wouldn't trust LegalZoom to actually have documents written by people who understand startups. And the other sources don't seem to provide offer le
19.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
someone needs to build a web app that asks a few basic questions, gives you some check boxes to click and then generates all the standard PDFs you need for seed funding, employee agreements, etc.
20.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Points also to the issue that thinking about security from a perimeter point of view (everything outside firewall is bad, everything inside is good) is outdated. There is no inside vs outside anymore.
21.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Yeah, there are definitely Excel models, but personally I find it easier to think Python than Excel. Over time I think there's an interesting opportunity to simulate more what-if scenarios as well and again personal preference is to code in
22.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Another great education OS is xv6 from MIT http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/xv6-book/index.html
23.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
If you're interested in building consumer products, using popular consumer products like Twitter is a must. It's just sort of expected that you have this background when you go talk to other consumer internet people. Plus your products will
24.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Careful what dictionary you use...my /usr/share/dict/words has things in it that might not be polite/acceptable to suggest.
25.
Will Normal Folks Ever Use Twitter?(livedigitally.com)
2 points by tom_pinckney 17y ago|2 comments
26.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
Unfortunately, academic computer scientists still seem to model their field after the “hard sciences” instead of what they should modeling it after — social sciences like economics or sociology. As a result, computer scientists spend a lot
27.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
As someone who is one of those "hardcore eng." types from MIT, one of the biggest differences I noticed between Berkeley/Stanford and MIT was how many Berkeley/Stanford students were actively involved in companies while in school. I think t
28.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
I find that I need transactional databases less and less. Whether I specifically don't need SQL is not clear -- it's a great abstraction for storing and manipulating data. Specifically, what I loose with transactions is fault tolerance and
29.
by tom_pinckney 17y ago
My personal experience building two startup consumer websites has been that ORMs have been a mistake. Perhaps in enterprise environments where you have a large IT staff and want to isolate DB specifics and the whole data access layer ORMs m