jaylevitt

Then let us help him.

Evidence you like "proves" claims. Evidence you don't like "purports to show" counterclaims. Luckily, people you like then "explain" why the evidence you don't like was wrong, and then it's "settled".

Man, if you could hook up a Data Clip to http://explain.depesz.com, how great would that be?

One of the most interesting lessons from "Founders at Work" is that for everyone who built their desks out of wooden doors, there was another startup with Aerons. For every company with a rigid process, there was another with rough consensus. Bootstrapped? VC-funded. Comp-sci genius? Journeyman coder. You get the idea.

There's more than one way to do it.

Exactly. My iPhone can process 800 million requests per second. It's just that those requests are to add two integers.

A request for static content != a request for dynamic content != a request for inter-user messaging != a request for a recommendation engine.

The gem 'foreigner' makes them painless, and supports Postgres, Oracle, and I think MSSQL.

I'm curious: Gmail, since the very beginning, has been predicated on the idea that Google will serve you relevant, content-related ads. (I thought that was a non-starter, but the world proved me wrong.) How long did you use them, and what finally triggered you to say "No, this is not OK"?

Even given the reporters' privilege, the First Amendment has nothing to do with whether it's legal (or stupid) for Path to be uploading his address book to their servers. Path is not the government.

That means he's not only a sloppy journalist for not explaining his First Amendment point, but he's doubly sloppy for implying that he talked to any lawyers while writing this article. Because if he did, they'd have said "Go check out jaylevitt's excellent comment on HN explaining why that's irrelevant."

GM tried this with Saturn, among many other innovations; Saturn failed, but it sounds like the failure was due to internal strife, not the no-haggle pricing.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/04/03/saturn-was-...

You don't think good jazz players know their chord scales, though?

I'll add n=1 to your theory. I'm definitely a right-brained programmer, vaguely synesthetic, and an OCD one at that. I don't write code; I just sneeze some code out and keep straightening up till it's all pretty.

This means I'm not going to get better at math, doesn't it?

> then he cannot build large scale systems

If that's true, it's new. I don't know the difference between a B+ tree and any other type of tree, and I built the world's then-largest email system in the '90s, eventually pushing 4,000 TPS through servers less powerful than an iPhone. Some problems just don't involve algorithms at a visible level.

We had one filesystem with one type of key-value indexing, and whatever that was, that's what we used. Both disk I/O and RAM were too constrained to worry about O(n); n was < 500, data structures couldn't even exceed 32k, and even linked lists were too slow - we used arrays. The only algorithm we (consciously) used was a hashing function for our cache keys and sharding, and we were far more concerned about its uniform distribution than its performance.

That class of problem is less prevalent today, but it's at least plausible that there's somebody architecting large-scale systems where the only algorithm is "do very few things very quickly".

Watching, learning and forever re-thinking.

I was at AOL from 1989 to 2001. When I started, there were 150 employees, and a month later, we had one of those "Look around you - everyone you don't see isn't here anymore" layoffs. When I left, there were 10,000 employees, not counting the 90K cable techs at Time Warner. In between, I learned more than any MBA course could teach, because I saw everything we did right - and everything we did wrong.

As time went on, I got to revisit our old mistakes in a new light. Business books are best read years after the fact, when you can see which predictions hit their mark and which were passing fads. A decade later, I'm still gaining new understandings into why we were bound to fail, business-wise, and what technical leaps we made that would still be useful today. (Hey, turns out multiplexed connections ARE more efficient! Hi, SPDY.)

There are three ways to understand what makes a city tick: Study its history, ask a realtor, or live there. When you live there, you have less formal, analytical knowledge, but you also have an intuitive sense of how things work. That intuition is gold.

So really, I'd just recommend getting a job someplace that grows into a multi-billion dollar global megacorporation - and keep notes. Hindsight is 20/20, and history repeats itself. That's a winning freaking formula right there.

Also, mail everyone CDs, and be sure to get Apple to pay you to develop a service and then pay you to discontinue it. Twice.

""For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science."

That's nothing - you should see what the offline dating world does.

Yes. We used to get hundreds of letters from English teachers pointing out that the correct phrasing was "You Have Mail". In fact, at one point, the AOL welcome screen said "You Have Mail", even though the voice still said "You've Got Mail".

But, like "idonethis", and like you, we thought our version was just.. stickier. And it stuck.

Downvoter, this was my point: Sticky beats grammar. (See also: Think Different.) Sorry if I was too terse to make it clear.

> "iDoneThis" isn't even proper grammar

Neither was "You've Got Mail."

One important firewall that can't deal with it: Amazon's NAT images for EC2. AFAICT, there's no way to run an ftp client behind Amazon's NAT unless you open all outbound ports, because the server is still the one that specifies which port the client should use for its PASV connection.

I think most firewalls solve this by actually rewriting the FTP packets on the fly (IIRC Cisco calls these "fixups"). That's seriously, seriously broken.

Are you sure? A day or two ago someone on HN said that newer MacBooks had the LED wired in series with the camera's power supply.

I've read a few books on data warehousing, and maybe you can confirm my suspicion:

Isn't ETL just an acronym that means "I wrote this Perl script to populate the database"?

How on earth is that even an industry?

From one of our evil scientists:

  Why [Everyone Else] Is a Hypocrite -Kurzban
  How The Mind Works -Pinker
  The Stuff of Thought -Pinker
  The Evolution of Human Sexuality -Symons
  Where Mathematics Comes From -Lakoff & Nunez
  Passions Within Reason -Frank
  Culture of Honor -Nisbett & Cohen

The author sounds knowledgeable, but the reference to Y2K as an overreaction makes me think he hasn't a clue.

Kenneth, boychik... how much effort do you think it took to make sure Y2K didn't become a memorable problem?

This is:

(a) unimpressive, because it's obvious that you went and registered a bunch of domains with a version of their name that they don't use (christopher, benjamin, melvin, middle initial, etc), and

(b) a bad idea, because at best it's lulz for geeks in the know, but at worst it's "SOPA opponents have gone too far: they hacked web sites of the U.S. government!"

Lose it.

Commodore mode.

As a layperson, I think Kahneman's work is brilliant and I can't wait to read the book, but do understand that to the actual evil scientists - research psychologists - he is Donald Knuth, not, um, whoever's hot in CS these days. They think his ideas revolutionized the field a few decades ago, and it's great that he finally got his book published, but meanwhile, we've learned a lot and that whole dual-system thing is kinda quaint.

So lucky for us, if Facebook were really basing their designs around what is more Poor Richard's Almanac than the Bible, we can build far more compelling experiences than Facebook using actual cutting-edge psychology - and I feel kinda lucky to get paid to do just that.

Good point about "rights". We should respond by saying we DO support their rights - just not SPECIAL rights.

No, the project is completely honest; it just has erroneous punctuation in the headline, which should properly read:

"JQuery Rewritten, Ground Up"

Now THAT is a linkbait title. You don't enable Facebook's log infrastructure; you enable Facebook-STYLE log infrastructure for sites that don't have insane-scale performance needs.

Big difference.

Wild guess: Two days of frantic last-minute preparation, one day of rollout, and two days of frantic hotfixes before most folks go home for the weekend.

The pharma counterfeiters ARE the botnet herders ARE the credit card rings. And counterfeit drugs would have fallen under SOPA.

SOPA was a horrible idea, of course. But yes, any anti-counterfeiting laws can also be cybercrime laws.