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docmach

87 karma · joined February 8, 2008

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docmach··on [dead]
Why does this belong on Hacker News?
docmach··on Ask HN: Does patronizing marketing material work?
Without naming names it's hard to know what you're talking about. If it's public marketing material why not provide a link?
docmach··on BookBook - a stealthy cover for MacBook
I doubt a magnet that small would cause any problems. I'm not sure about the new MacBooks Pros, but the old ones had an embedded magnet that I think was used to detect the screen closing.
docmach··on Linkli.st
The color scheme is hard to look at and it doesn't seem to do anything that delicious doesn't. What makes this notable?
docmach··on Carnegie Mellon student robbed, uses iPhone to track down culprits
MobileMe will show you a map of where your iPhone is.
docmach··on Ask HN: How to minimize costs (ie rent) for a startup?
In Lincoln, NE you can get a one bedroom apartment with utilities included for $425 and if you are happy with 15' x 20' one room apartment you can get one for $275. There is a college here so finding interns is fairly easy and there are lots of small startups. However, once you start growing you might have trouble hiring enough people since there just aren't as many people who want to be in Lincoln as there are people who want to be in Silicon Valley or the east coast. I'm not very social so I don't know how good the socializing is here.
docmach··on Ask HN: How to minimize costs (ie rent) for a startup?
Not living in NYC is a great way to save money. If you don't need to be there you can live on less than $800 a month in some places.
docmach··on Bombax: OS X Web Development Platform
If they wanted an Objective-C web framework it seems like they would have been better off improving GNUstep Web. From looking at the site I don't see what makes this special other than using Cocoa. It might have some compelling features that GNUstep Web doesn't, but they don't make it easy to find out what they are.
docmach··on Bombax: OS X Web Development Platform
Why? What makes this framework better to do penetration testing on than other frameworks?
docmach··on EnviroMission Plans Massive Solar Updraft Towers for Arizona
Getting the power to the US from a large third world nation is probably not as cheap as easy as building them in the US. There is also lots of land in Arizona that isn't useful for very many things.
docmach··on Mongodb vs couchdb
CouchDB 0.8 is pretty old. If you tried the newest version your results might be significantly different.
docmach··on Things startups do and don't need
Why do you think that Microsoft products are necessary to sell to large businesses? There might not be any large businesses that don't have any Microsoft products, but I've seen several successful sales to very large business by small companies without Microsoft products.
docmach··on The Master, The Expert, The Programmer
That seems like it could easily end up being very slow. The OS doesn't know what data is going to be needed and it could page out the wrong data. It's probably worth trying, but it doesn't seem like a masterful solution.
docmach··on Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar
Sitting next to someone tapping away on their phone during a movie is distracting and saying that other people are doing it as well is just a childish excuse.
docmach··on Froth: Objective-C Web Application Framework
The deployment may be cross platform, but to develop with Cocotron you need a Mac. I didn't see the reasoning behind them choosing Cocotron explained on the project page, but it seems like if they really wanted it to be cross platform they should have used GNUstep. It would also be nice to have a comparison between this and GNUstepWeb.
docmach··on Soon-to-Be Open Secret (Males in College Admission)
Why would it be better in the long run?
docmach··on The country club revolt (aka Operation Chokehold)
That seems like a much better comparison. However, what it leaves out is the network usage. Maybe there aren't as many people using one carrier's towers in those other places or maybe the usage isn't as heavy. So while we know that AT&T's network can't handle the load we don't know if it's because of an inferior network or because of higher usage. I would be interested in seeing those kind of statistics compared for well performing and poorly performing networks, but I don't know if that information will ever be available.
docmach··on The country club revolt (aka Operation Chokehold)
Being sparsely populated makes it much easier to run a stable network, so that's not a very good comparison. It's not that AT&T's network is bad everywhere, but places with lots of people in a small area cause problems. Where I am the service is excellent. I've never had a dropped call here and the data speed is always high.
docmach··on Advanced programming languages (Haskell, Scala, SML, OCaml, Scheme)
If you have 100% code coverage you don't necessarily have 100% path coverage, so there could still be errors that a statically typed language would catch at compile time. Realistically, most programs aren't going to have extensive test suits that get anywhere near 100% code coverage, so static typing becomes even more valuable. Also, running a full test suite for every build would take much more time that running a type checker.
docmach··on Programming languages that every developer should know
C is not a bad language for humans. It's simple enough to be able to see how the machine will execute it but not low level enough that you have to manually manage everything, like assembly. It's not always the best choice, but for some things it is. It's also good to know so that you understand how how computers work instead of assuming that higher level languages are magical.
docmach··on Poll: Language Use
Other: Tcl
docmach··on Ask HN: If you didn't have to worry about healthcare, would you start a company?
This is why I'm saying that healthcare isn't a necessity. I might not need any medical care for years, but if I needed to spend 4 nights in a hospital it would bankrupt me. This makes not having health insurance risky, but starting a company has its risks. I would say that most of them are probably not as serious as this, but it's still just a risk.
docmach··on X86 assembly encounter
As I posted in a comment on the article, he seems to have unrealistic expectations for an x86 assembler. TI's DSPs have a nice assembly because of their architecture. The x86 architecture is too complicated and the implementations too diverse to have an assembler like he wants.
docmach··on Ask HN: If you didn't have to worry about healthcare, would you start a company?
It's also different because healthcare isn't a necessity. Many people can go for years with no health issues, but everyone needs to eat on a regular basis.
docmach··on Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974089 has a direct link to the news at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/new-amazon-ec2-feature-bo... .
docmach··on Of Geeks and Girls
What makes you think diversity helps in any environment? I think that homogeneity is a great help for efficiency, which is often important. Diversity has its uses, but it's not for everything.
docmach··on Star Wars intro using CSS3 and HTML5
It works fine on the latest WebKit nightly on 10.5.
docmach··on Performance comparison between EC2, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Prgmr
If cost reduction is the reason then CPU resources should be higher as well, but they don't seem to be.
docmach··on Performance comparison between EC2, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Prgmr
I think the big advantage of Amazon is that you can scale up and down quickly so that you aren't paying for services you don't need. They also have the advantage of better integration with their other services since you don't pay for transfers within the same region and the transfers are fast since it's all on their network.
docmach··on Performance comparison between EC2, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Prgmr
Why does Prgmr offer so much more memory/$ compared to the other providers? Is there something about the usual workloads that makes RAM less important or is it based on hardware capabilities?
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