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Nwallins

665 karma · joined March 28, 2007

Ruby hacker with an appetite for extertion, both mental and physical. Amateur DBA (who isn't, these days?).
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Nwallins··on [dead]
It does not tell you how to calculate the interchange, but it does explain what interchange is and describes the variables that go into the equation.
Nwallins··on James Gosling: Some more comments about the Oracle Java lawsuit
Interestingly relevant to BSD-style vs. GPL-style licensing:

> The vision of freedom that most of the big corporate interests had was the ability to make their platform sticky: to destroy interoperability so that (for example) Java software developed on Microsoft platforms could only run on Microsoft platforms. They wanted the freedom to capture developers. ... "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers.

Nwallins··on Wired's bullshit "The web is dead" graph

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby

    # you insensitive clod!
Nwallins··on Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already
> The argument for evented concurrency assumes threads work. Async design isn't a reaction to MRI's crappy green threads.

Truly? To my understanding, event loops require inversion of control (and likely callbacks and broken exception handling). This is a large cost that requires a benefit to be worth it. I understand that benefit to be: you don't have to deal with threads (or bad implementations of such).

This blog post comes to mind: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2010/08/multithreaded-rails-...

Nwallins··on Not another CSS Framework (CSS Layouts that always work)
Too bad they don't dogfood it (source: Default.aspx):

    <div class=mainholder>
    ...
    <div class=sidebar>
    ...
    <div class=maincontent>
    ...
    etc.
Also, the classic (header, 3-col, footer) layout is missing.

e.g.

    HEADER
    ------
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    ------
    FOOTER
Nwallins··on Design For Hackers: Why You Don't Use Garamond on The Web
> Can you explain that further?

Here's a stab: The culture here is such that comments are for the sake of the readers and not the writer. Some amount of self-promotion is fine, but too much is not appreciated.

Nwallins··on What Happened to Yahoo
Sounds like Jamie Dimon, of JP Morgan Chase. He ended a multi-billion IT outsourcing deal with IBM in 2004:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/outsourcing/s...

Nwallins··on A paper trail of betrayal: Google's net neutrality collapse
> Many Microsoft decisions since the mid-90s (when I first started holding MSFT) have made life overall worse for me

That has nothing to do with your being a shareholder.

Nwallins··on A paper trail of betrayal: Google's net neutrality collapse
> Big corporations tend to operate in their stock's best interest, and this can still cause serious problems for their shareholders.

Erm, what? This seems contradictory on its face. The shareholder's only interest in a company is its stock performance, be it stock price or dividend payments. What sort of tendencies are you thinking of, here?

Nwallins··on Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"
The punchline is at the end:

> Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slanging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

Nwallins··on Lawrence Lessig's new TED talk
> don't the US corn subsidies for ethanol actually make corn more expensive?

My understanding is that the subsidies are there to incentivize corn production. The video says that the subsidized cost of corn production is actually negative -- that you can go plant a corn field and will have made money before you sell a single ear.

Once the corn is produced, if there are additional subsidies for ethanol production from corn, then that may divert corn from food uses. It may increase the cost of HFCS production.

But the cost of corn production is still lower despite, or perhaps even because of, the ethanol subsidies.

Nwallins··on Tribalism is the enemy within
> These are obviously mutually exclusive definitions!

Not at all. He is saying racism is a subset of tribalism, as is being an OS fanboy. Tribalism the the umbrella term.

Nwallins··on High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay
> However, the other counter argument against HFT is that it actually doesn't really provide liquidity to the market, as evident by the June flash-crash.

As far as I can tell, this is the only argument presented against HFT.

> But HFT dealers stopped trading that day, triggering a lot of people's stop-market orders

Are there other factors involved in this outcome, or is this a canonical HFT failure?

Nwallins··on Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass
> the researchers hypothesized that, given some premises about evolution, poor women would have more kids earlier.

Um, isn't this already well known? Did they not craft the hypothesis to fit their existing understanding?

> Then they went and tested it.

No comment.

Nwallins··on How Map/Reduce works in Riak - webinar this Thursday
What exactly do you mean by replication with devices?
Nwallins··on The Trouble with Multicore
The "trouble" is only when you want a single process to monopolize the entirety of CPU resources. In today's (and even yesterday's?) processing environment, there are often tens if not hundreds of processes running at once, and 5 or 15 of them may be "performance critical".

Are multicore architectures not able to distribute this sort of load?

Nwallins··on The Trouble With Meritocracy
Erm, so the trouble with meritocracy is that higher education is bad? And we don't want to subject underprivileged demographics to the intellectually conformist ... education conveyor belt?

That we want to keep underprivileged demographics at home so they can critique the elites from afar?

Clarity is severely lacking. It's hard not to file this one under Anti-intellectual tripe.

Nwallins··on Dilbert on 'FU Money'
I came across it in James Clavell's 1981 novel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House
Nwallins··on RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000
> partly because I'm paranoid about getting sued by the RIAA.

No need to be paranoid, here. They only go after big distributors, not downloaders (aka leeches).

Nwallins··on Why I don't Trust Julian Assange
> the reuters/AP of ...

Unintentional irony? Both of those organizations' reputations have become quite tarnished. They are certainly not contemporary bastions of fair-handed transparency -- witness Reuters' photo manipulation and AP's quote-whoring.

Nwallins··on VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs
> Option – Open Source the Product

> No, Not really an option at all. Who would work on it? Sure lots of people love to consume open source projects, but very few people contribute to them. And I have put a LOT of money into this product, I am not going to just give it away until I can at least break even. I have to put my kids through college, hopefully reclaim part of the money I have put into the company, etc. And lets face it donation type projects never, ever make money. Advertising on the site, etc are all pointless wastes of time.

Um, how is this not an option when terminating the project is? I'm not saying that he should open source anything, but this justification is silly, especially when compared to his previous explicit option of killing and burying the project.

Nwallins··on Why we need the rich ("on wealth creation by a wealth creator")
Given that the story is a defense of people who generate wealth, I am not surprised that he did not focus on people who do not generate wealth. I am not sure it is a failing, either.
Nwallins··on Why we need the rich ("on wealth creation by a wealth creator")
> it totally failed to address the question of wealth received through means other than entrepreneurship

These people receive wealth. They do not necessarily generate it. Athletes and movie stars are certainly talented, but entertainment is a place to push excess wealth and not necessarily a source of it.

> it claims that the rich got that way by doing work other people don't want to do, by which logic the average garbage man should be rich since he is doing work no one wants to do either.

No, doing disdainful work is not sufficient for being wealthy. Nor is it necessary. He is saying that it is common, though.

> Fourth, it lumps short sellers in with various other parasites trying to feast on the wealthy. But if good entrepreneurs will always (always!) grow the value of their companies, why should they fear short sellers?

Hm, I missed this part in the essay. Most businessmen recognize the value of short sellers in the marketplace, even if it makes their job harder. It's kind of like competition in that way.

Nwallins··on [dead]
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/07/500x_s...
Nwallins··on Why I Don't Like Stock Buybacks
I don't understand this point:

> I don't remember the exact details of the buyback at TheStreet.com but we started buying the stock and it kept going down. We kept buying it. But we were losing money on each buyback because we were overpaying for our own stock as it kept going down.

It seems to me that if your stock is trading at under book value, then you would be underpaying if you are buying it. Especially if it keeps going down.

Isn't the idea that the stock is undervalued? Why not buy low now and even consider selling high at a later date?

Nwallins··on [dead]
Old story is old. The guy's name is Joe and gave his name to news reporters as 'Gray Powell'. Flagged.
Nwallins··on The biggest bet on longbets.com: $1,000,000
49 weeks worth of steak, presumably...
Nwallins··on AOL To Sell Bebo For Around $10 Million
> Here’s why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset.

...yet another perverse outcome of overly-complicated, micro-managed tax codes. The law of unintended consequences strikes again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences

Nwallins··on Native ZFS for Linux (non-FUSE)
Ah, it is nice to see the licensing issue is directly addressed -- http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq

> The CDDL does not restrict modification and release of the ZFS source code which is publicly available as part of OpenSolaris. The ZFS code can be modified to build as a CDDL licensed kernel module which is not distributed as part of the Linux kernel. This makes a Native ZFS on Linux implementation possible if you are willing to download and build it yourself.

Nwallins··on What Python Fixes
> the problem of having a too fast processor on your deployment platform

The sarcasm here is unwarranted, as is basically your entire paragraph. Why not just say: Python is slow ?

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