philwise | 4 years ago | on: Masten Space Systems is using Ada and Spark to land on the Moon's south pole [pdf]
philwise's comments
philwise | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity?
A big, decent organization will have the structures in place to help you learn this. I'd suggest bringing it up at your next 1:1: 'I'm a bit worried about how I did in these PRs <open browser>'. Your manager may also have the same worries, in which case you skipped that conversation along to the point of working on a solution, or you might find out that what you are doing is on-par and there is nothing to worry about. Training in new skills is bread-and-butter stuff for a mature organization, so I would look for support in your normal management chain.
philwise | 7 years ago | on: Apple’s New iPad Pro Ads Were Shot and Made Entirely on the iPad Pro [video]
Six year old kids can do amazing things, as long as their environment doesn't railroad them down boring paths.
philwise | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to communicate specs for web app re-write to remote developer?
Each story would be a 1-2 page Word doc, with a long form description of the behaviour required and mockups of the UI.
philwise | 11 years ago | on: Espruino – An open JavaScript microcontroller
philwise | 13 years ago | on: Draconian ‘Wi-Fi police' stalk Olympic Games
Basically they waited until the last minute then it just happened without any consultation.
philwise | 13 years ago | on: How well does Khan Academy teach?
If someone comes up with a theory on a better way to teach something, cool. A/B test it and keep the winner.
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: OLAP and Reporting that feels like 2012
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Will Industry Agree to a Meaningful Do Not Track?
philwise | 14 years ago | on: USPS gets into the SPAM business
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Vortex radio waves could boost wireless capacity “infinitely”
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Urban Airship: Postgres to NoSQL and back
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Google App Engine leaves preview, new pricing
$9/app/month means that it doesn't really make sense for tiny hobby sites any more: it is comparable in cost to a tiny VPS host, and my VPS currently handles 19 domains.
The place where GAE makes most sense is the 'line of business' app that is basically just a set of forms backed by a database. Those kind of apps don't have any complex things going on that are going to require integration with existing code or custom server configuration: both places where the current crop of PaaS offerings risky right now.
Line of business apps currently require lots of manual labour from DBAs and IS, so paying $9/month to run the HR application is going to be a pretty good deal.
philwise | 14 years ago | on: Amazon ElastiCache Details - Managed Memcache
Obviously there is overhead, but if you have machines already and they are not maxed out on RAM then the $10/GB price is not far of the real cost.
philwise | 15 years ago | on: The Javascript memory leak we all do
philwise | 15 years ago | on: High Frequency Trading Development Kit
There are plenty of suppliers who offer stuff in the market, for example replacing one half of a dual CPU system with an FPGA and in general some variant of 'pick a fast interconnect and stick an FPGA at the end'
I can't see why this offers anything more to the discussion over a product announcement.
philwise | 15 years ago | on: High Frequency Trading Development Kit
philwise | 15 years ago | on: On moving from CouchDB to Riak
philwise | 15 years ago | on: On moving from CouchDB to Riak
Given that a pair of 2TB drives is less than $250 on ebuyer right now, 2TB of data is not 'big data'. You could comfortably stuff that in any decent database (SQL Server for example, I'm sure PostgreSQL would work too).
Just because a tiny machine on slicehost isn't big enough doesn't mean that your data won't fit in a normal database.
philwise | 15 years ago | on: Meet the Bisickle, a Commuter Bike Concept
1) The handle bars have two hand positions, yet no brakes. Dual brakes are possible, but expensive, fiddly and don't work with hydro disk brakes.
2) No mud guards.
3) Why solid spoke carbon fiber wheels when stressed steel spokes work so well?
4) Riding a bike with a 8 inch wide cross bar: a 10 minute mockup of this by sellotaping a lunchbox to to crossbar of a normal bike would reveal why this doesn't work
5) The saddlebag briefcase will interfere with your heel while pedaling: panniers need to much further back.
6) No lights