scott_meyer

4 ms·

1.
by scott_meyer 21d ago
Discussing trivial optimizations is a waste of valuable design time. You're never going to "forget" an optimization. The running system will remind you when the optimization is actually needed.
2.
by scott_meyer 4mo ago
Proof by contradiction requires finding a single contradiction. Practical utility just requires that contradiction be infrequent enough.
3.
by scott_meyer 2y ago
Layoffs are not about cost, they are about power. The economic result is just confirmation. A large company in actual financial distress will sell off a division.
4.
by scott_meyer 3y ago
Two things: 1. You have given up on any sort of consistency. 2. The database implementation will never be able to optimize a lookup workload which is pretty close to pessimal. Not caring about 99% is only viable if can actually avoid the o
5.
by scott_meyer 3y ago
what is a document? How is an ORANUM or a bignum not a document? One motivation for creating documents is that modeling document contents as relations requires the creation of a bunch of primary keys which no natural definition. A simple do
6.
by scott_meyer 5y ago
Been doing this for nearly 40 years. No sign of doom. What I think you're discovering is just that there is a large amount of low-aspiration work out there. That is as true of FANG as anywhere else. IMO specializing in any particular b
7.
by scott_meyer 5y ago
PathQuery was started by Warren Harris. At Metaweb, Warren did a rewrite of MQL in OCaml which we never shipped because of the Google acquisition. He spent much of the first year at Google working on a prototype of PathQuery in Haskell. Th
8.
by scott_meyer 5y ago
Doing a bunch of math about payoffs and probabilities completely misses the most important point: When joining a startup you are a minority investor. The value of your options depends 100% on the integrity of the majority investors.
9.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
I am a huge fan of Frank McSherry's work and don't necessarily agree with the premise that DD is somehow failing. However,... Batch data processing is very well understood, cheap and getting cheaper every year. So, if you can affo
10.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
>Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans As a statistic, reading is only significant in the past 200 years or so. Given that there was a similar kerfuffle a couple thousand years ago when we shifted from memoriz
11.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
>I can't wait until I have enough money to be financially independent and never have to do this nonsense again. There are a lot of people operating on that plan. Mostly it doesn't work out for them. Play this forward ten years
12.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Concurrency is hard because we invented a bunch of theoretical machinery (semaphores, mutexes, condition variables,...) and embedded it in languages such that most of the programs one can express are bad: racey or deadlock prone. Compare wi
13.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Neither. Learn Scheme. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is still the best single book on computer programming: the most important concepts (closures, continuations, macros, transformations,...) for the least expense in comp
14.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Aside from what comes for free with "log-structured" there is no special treatment for temporal data.
15.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Don't despair. Datalog is alive and well. Yes, it does compose beautifully. However, with composition solved, you'll discover that a naive implementation of relational algebra will suffer from spurious cross products. https:&#x2F
16.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
"Technical debt" is the difference between the code that you have and the code that you would write if starting over. Does your final code reflect what you learned while writing it? "Technical surplus" is your ability to
17.
LIquid: The Soul of a new Graph Database, part 2(engineering.linkedin.com)
1 points by scott_meyer 6y ago|0 comments
18.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Upgrade aversion is the natural consequence of the automatic upgrade subscription business model. If developers don't have to sell the next version and the customer can't easily leave, ...
19.
by scott_meyer 6y ago
Just watch this chart for a couple years: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
20.
by scott_meyer 7y ago
So, imagine how things are going to work out when you have to explain to a VP that you have absolutely no idea why the site was down for 4 hours, but you have now added logging such that when it happens again you might be able to debug the
21.
by scott_meyer 13y ago
Can you name any widely used piece of Software that has not been rewritten at least once? Rewrites: Firefox, IE, Word, Windows, MacOS, ... Many of these have been rewritten multiple times and they are all orders of magnitude more complex th
22.
by scott_meyer 13y ago
Was that with or without a tip?
23.
by scott_meyer 15y ago
Stock options have always been valued at the discretion of the board. Zynga is perhaps guilty of coming up in "innovative" ways of manipulating value but the end result: optionees get less money than they thought, is the same. Choose your
24.
by scott_meyer 15y ago
You write "stop the world" and "concurrent access" in the same sentence. What is up with that? When we manage to go for 10 years without getting 5 or 6 papers claiming to "solve the concurrent/pauseless GC problem" then, perhaps, it might
25.
by scott_meyer 15y ago
Read your own words "immutability allows for concurrent access" Most GCs mutate (mark bits, semi-space copy, etc.) The immutability of Haskell data structures is an illusion, and from the standpoint of real concurrent access, an expensive
26.
by scott_meyer 16y ago
So, from the executive summary, it appears that NASA looked at the throttle system and was unable to find a systematic explanation for it being stuck open. A stuck throttle, by itself, is quite awkward but if you have a working brake overr
27.
A Freebase implementation of the Facebook Graph API(blog.freebase.com)
29 points by scott_meyer 16y ago|2 comments
28.
by scott_meyer 16y ago
Metaweb (San Francisco) is hiring http://www.metaweb.com/jobs systems programming, C, ml, python