WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

whage's comments

whage | 5 months ago | on: F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]

I've been looking for an article that I think I found 10+ years ago on the web about a very similar topic, something like "the evolution of database systems". It was a very well written article that I just skimmed through and planned to read properly but could never find it again. I remember it had hand-drawn-style diagrams of database architectures with blue backgrounds, sometimes squiggly lines and maybe even some bees on them (could be just my mind mixing it with something). I'd be eternally grateful if someone here could find it.

whage | 2 years ago | on: When Random Isn't

This post feels like recent movie trailers. The way you wrote it makes me believe you know what you are talking about but I have no idea. Care to give the curious reader pointers to the topics you mention? I mean the "printing press to furnace" analogy of the economy, or what you mean by 1971 or the gold bug or the 50 year transistor omg what?

whage | 3 years ago | on: Pushup: a new compiler for making web apps in Go

This really seems like php. I also think that mixing UI with logic is a recipe for disaster and there is already php (and several others?) for that. I suppose the creators of such a thing have a decent knowledge of compilers and related domains, knowledge which really seems wasted on a project like this.

whage | 3 years ago | on: A Ruby program that generates itself through a 128-language quine loop

Ken Thompson wrote in his famous paper [1] about quines:

> If you have never done this, I urge you to try it on your own. The discovery of how to do it is a revelation that far surpasses any benefit obtained by being told how to do it

Every once in a while I give them a try but I couldn't yet create one and it frustrates me very much. Afraid of being denied that "revelation" I never dared to read his paper past that point. I'm afraid I might never read it because of my ego.

1: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

whage | 3 years ago | on: Lisp can be “hard” real time [pdf] (2000)

I appreciate the clarification but what I didn't get is what "symbolic processing" has to do with "hard real-time" (who cares what the language looks like?) and similarly, how is "single processor" related to "hard real-time"

whage | 3 years ago | on: Lisp can be “hard” real time [pdf] (2000)

In every paper there comes a line at which I completely lose what they are talking about. If I'm lucky, this happens after the abstract/intro. In this case, this was it: "A real-time symbolic processing system on a single processor should have the following four features". What?

whage | 3 years ago | on: More content by people, for people in Search

Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images. Maybe increase the ranking of pages that don't change much in their look and content as time goes by. I don't know. Would it be useful? How would it pay for itself?

whage | 3 years ago | on: More content by people, for people in Search

This resonates with me so freaking much. I am disgusted by how every bit of information on webpages seem to be buried between paragraphs of empty EMPTY talk and even when they seem to get to the point, most of the time there is no real information there. Sorry, this had to come out. We really need better search engines.

whage | 7 years ago | on: A Primer on Type Systems

The way the author describes static and dynamic typing seems to imply that static == compiled and dynamic == interpreted. I probably misunderstand something, can someone help me clear things up?

whage | 8 years ago | on: Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine

> We know that sharing Hadoop helped our competitors, but we also know that the revenue stream comes from ads.

This is not clear to me, can you please explain? I'm still stuck at thinking "if you help your competitors then you give up some of your market share".

EDIT: your pie analogy is really nice, I guess it means you grow the whole market by sharing tools like Vespa so you get a smaller slice of the bigger pie. I still don't get how the "revenue stream comes from ads" part relates to everything else.

page 1
more