Hacker News: bayareaguy

New comment by bayareaguy in "About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean"

bayareaguy — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:18:35 +0000

The distributed database systems of the mid 80s such as the Teradata DBC 1012[1] are better prior art for Map/Reduce.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBC_1012

New comment by bayareaguy in "Automatic REST API for Any Postgres Database"

bayareaguy — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 23:16:15 +0000

HTSQL[1,2] by Clark Evans is similar.

1- http://htsql.org/doc/overview.html

2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTSQL

New comment by bayareaguy in "Ask HN: What language will you learn in 2015?"

bayareaguy — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:50:00 +0000

Jepsen[1] is the killer app that's leading me to learn more about the Clojure and Go ecosystems.

I mostly write Python by day but since Jepsen revealed consistency problems in etcd[2], I've had to learn more Clojure/leiningen to see if the ?quorum=true option fixed them.

What I've learned so far is that Clojure's error reporting sucks unless you use something like Cider[3] and that etcd till fails to pass Jepsen with ?quorum=true

1- https://github.com/aphyr/jepsen

2- https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul

3- https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider

New comment by bayareaguy in "Re: MemSQL the “world's fastest database”? (2012)"

bayareaguy — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 16:48:33 +0000

If you are interested in SSD optimizations you may want to read this research from Microsoft: The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware[1]

1 - http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1787...

New comment by bayareaguy in "What Happens to Older Developers?"

bayareaguy — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 17:03:16 +0000

I'm about as old and I've lived in the bay area all my life. I've seen the popularity of things on his resume rise and fall. I'm not on any social network and my bank account has never exceeded five figures. I could be this guy. Maybe I will be in a few years.

But even though he probably has plenty of skills that could be useful I doubt I'd seriously consider this guy at my present employer. Why? Because his whole signal to noise ratio is way too low. He's got a ton of red flags and "resume smells":

  * Freelancer for 11 years
  * No mention of employers or marketable projects in last 5 years.  
  * Laundry list of antiquated technologies (some listed multiple times)
  * Lots of irrelevent stuff (reasons for leaving, college honors from distant past)
  * Random WTFs thrown in for good measure (oldcoder.org? christfollower.me?) 
  * No clear mention of goal, purpose, motivation or passion.  
  * Comments showing pride about being a "generalist"

You never get a second chance to make a first impression and unless you're introduced by a trusted third party the impression your resume makes will be the first. Each and every word should help a potential employer want to talk with you. Your content should be informative and relevent. Writing it may not be easy but remember what is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.

New comment by bayareaguy in "Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees"

bayareaguy — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 21:52:13 +0000

Says the game developer who sells virtual goods...

I've lived in the bay area longer than BART has been in operation, and I'd rather see my fares raised to pay the BART employees even more so that they can focus on the safety and security of the system instead of having to be worred about being evicted to make room for some virtual good merchant.

BART workers directly help millions of people in the bay area every day and provide far more value to the bay area community and economy relative to what they are paid then do the participants in this forum.

New comment by bayareaguy in "Ask HN: Privacy conscious analytics?"

bayareaguy — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:48:31 +0000

You'll need to deploy your own private log analytics. While there are plenty of products developed over the past decade to help you do this, the "in" approach these days is a combination of Hadoop for storage and ETL and a more traditional data warehouse for summary queries and reports. Several presenters[1] at Hadoop World 2010 covered this.

1- http://www.cloudera.com/company/press-center/hadoop-world-ny...

New comment by bayareaguy in "Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty"

bayareaguy — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 06:32:42 +0000

Both my kids spent considerable time "role playing" and focusing on non-combative activities like chatting and trying out different variations of character choices so I'd say the answer is definitely yes, especially if the game builds on age-appropriate social curiosity or borrows from familiar cultural elements. My daughter especially loved things like playing "barbie" by showing us different combinations of clothes she obtained and playing pranks like walking around cities dressed as an NPC, hoping to fool other players with emotes.

New comment by bayareaguy in "Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty"

bayareaguy — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:03:44 +0000

A similar thing happened in my own family a while back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226987

New comment by bayareaguy in "Google Circles? Meh. Here's Lycos Circles (2004)"

bayareaguy — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:25:46 +0000

It looks like it did. The internet archive crawled bits of Lycos Circles from 2005 to 2009[1] as well as the original eCircles all the way back to 1998[2]

1- http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://circles.lycos.com

2- http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://ecircles.com

New comment by bayareaguy in "Ask HN: An Acceptable Erlang"

bayareaguy — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:23:22 +0000

You may be right - logic programming isn't easy and the semantics are different, so it may make things more confusing for a complete beginner (I learned Prolog long ago). For a deeper understanding I would still recommend trying it.

New comment by bayareaguy in "Ask HN: An Acceptable Erlang"

bayareaguy — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:30:15 +0000

Erlang is easier if you know a little Prolog. Perhaps you could download SWI-Prolog[1] and spend a little time doing simple logic programming[2]?

1- http://www.swi-prolog.org/

2- https://sites.google.com/site/prologsite/prolog-problems

New comment by bayareaguy in "Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today"

bayareaguy — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:33:52 +0000

A "dot.com" company called eCircles[1,2] took exactly this approach between 1998-2001. They were later sold to Classmates[3].

1- http://www.pcworld.com/article/9704/join_hands_in_ecircles.h...

2- http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-55246946.html

3- http://books.google.com/books?id=OCRdSXSKZ-AC&pg=PA131&#...

New comment by bayareaguy in "Ask HN: Linux rig for data mining and machine learning"

bayareaguy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 01:35:08 +0000

A former employer of mine in the financial sector used Scalable Informatics[1] and Dell[2] servers for that sort of thing.

1- http://scalableinformatics.com/

2- http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-cloud-servers

New comment by bayareaguy in "The iPod of 2004"

bayareaguy — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:26:41 +0000

the wheel was such a clever interface choice

... first seen on the ill-fated Modo four years earlier.

http://www.ideo.com/work/modo/

Transcript of Rob Pike interview on Go

bayareaguy — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 06:42:41 +0000

Article URL: http://jottit.com/fx8y6/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2265040

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bayareaguy in "SQL Databases Don't Scale"

bayareaguy — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:17:26 +0000

Dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859468

And here too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656

New comment by bayareaguy in "S-expressions for fun and profit"

bayareaguy — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:17:13 +0000

Presumably you could also write it in JavaScript or some other language with excellent JSON support

No surprise since JSON (aka JavaScript Object Notation) was designed for interpretation by JavaScript and subsets can also be directly interpreted by languages like Python.

New comment by bayareaguy in "Python 3.2 Released"

bayareaguy — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 01:02:29 +0000

One interesting thing from the "What's new in 3.2?"[1] page:

After the 3.2 release, there are plans to switch to Mercurial as the primary repository. This distributed version control system should make it easier for members of the community to create and share external changesets. See PEP 385 for details.

1- http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html

New comment by bayareaguy in "Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion"

bayareaguy — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 22:02:52 +0000

Care to elaborate in your own words why you think so?

I will be quite peeved if something I have been doing for years with combinations of tools like Dropbox and Truecrypt becomes more difficult or costly to me or my customers due to a patent like this one.