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bayareaguyon About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

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

bayareaguyon Automatic REST API for Any Postgres Database

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

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

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

bayareaguyon Ask HN: What language will you learn in 2015?

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

bayareaguyon Re: MemSQL the “world's fastest database”? (2012)

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...

bayareaguyon What Happens to Older Developers?

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.

bayareaguyon Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

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.

bayareaguyon Ask HN: Privacy conscious analytics?

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...

bayareaguyon Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty

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.

bayareaguyon Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty

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

bayareaguyon Google Circles? Meh. Here's Lycos Circles (2004)

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

bayareaguyon Ask HN: An Acceptable Erlang

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.

bayareaguyon Ask HN: An Acceptable Erlang

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

bayareaguyon Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today

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&#...

bayareaguyon Ask HN: Linux rig for data mining and machine learning

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

bayareaguyon The iPod of 2004

the wheel was such a clever interface choice

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

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

bayareaguyon SQL Databases Don't Scale

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

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

bayareaguyon S-expressions for fun and profit

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.

bayareaguyon Python 3.2 Released

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

bayareaguyon Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion

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.

bayareaguyon Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

Not so. As I commented earlier[1], SO's data/ink ratio sucks compared to YC.

1- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304

bayareaguyon Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion

Prior art?

2009 - http://www.randomwire.com/storing-sensitive-data-in-the-clou...

2008 - http://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-enc...

bayareaguyon Should Employers Be Allowed to Ask for Your Facebook Login?

I would think that this should be obvious, but sharing your password in such a circumstance appears prohibited by the Facebook terms of service[1]. More specifically:

  You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, 
  your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything 
  else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

1- http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?_fb_noscript=1

bayareaguyon A practical use for space-filling curves

Space filling curves are also good for building multi-dimensional indexes for databases.

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/TriStarp/pubs/bncod17.pdf

bayareaguyon Why I no longer trust EMC

I don't trust this guy, especially given his connections to EMC's competitors.

bayareaguyon Ask HN: what's up with HN and Lisp?

I'm eager to use Clojure professionally but Python is more practical. Another case of the "worse is better" syndrome.

bayareaguyon Pervasive myths about older software developers

  There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and
  therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore
  better."

  -- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"

bayareaguyon How to Identify a Good Perl Programmer

Indeed, as this poor student discovered the hard way...

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/03/13/208259/Sophomore-Uses...

Believe the Camel when it says -- third edition, page 69 -- "You will be miserable until you learn the difference between scalar and list context."

bayareaguyon Business Models That Rocked 2010

The models, from the slideshare notes[1]

  PatientsLikeMe.com
  Flattr.com
  Groupon.com
  Spotify.com
  PayWithaTweet.com
  HumbleBundle.com
  Free with in-app sales
  Quirky.com
  Airbnb.com
  Kickstarter.com

1- http://www.slideshare.net/boardofinnovation/10-business-mode...

bayareaguyon Minimalism: It Works

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans - John Lennon

bayareaguyon How Google DataWiki Differs from FluidDB

Reminds me of http://www.caspio.com/