Nwallins

Joined 19 years ago

Karma

665

Submissions

234

Member since

Mar 28

Ruby hacker with an appetite for extertion, both mental and physical. Amateur DBA (who isn't, these days?).

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Recent submissions

Comment · 16 years ago

It does not tell you how to calculate the interchange, but it does explain what interchange is and describes the variables that go into the equation.

Comment · 16 years ago

Interestingly relevant to BSD-style vs. GPL-style licensing:

> The vision of freedom that most of the big corporate interests had was the ability to make their platform sticky: to destroy interoperability so that (for example) Java software developed on Microsoft platforms could only run on Microsoft platforms. They wanted the freedom to capture developers. ... "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers.

Comment · 16 years ago

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby

    # you insensitive clod!

Comment · 16 years ago

> The argument for evented concurrency assumes threads work. Async design isn't a reaction to MRI's crappy green threads.

Truly? To my understanding, event loops require inversion of control (and likely callbacks and broken exception handling). This is a large cost that requires a benefit to be worth it. I understand that benefit to be: you don't have to deal with threads (or bad implementations of such).

This blog post comes to mind: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2010/08/multithreaded-rails-...

Comment · 16 years ago

Too bad they don't dogfood it (source: Default.aspx):

    <div class=mainholder>
    ...
    <div class=sidebar>
    ...
    <div class=maincontent>
    ...
    etc.

Also, the classic (header, 3-col, footer) layout is missing.

e.g.

    HEADER
    ------
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    C|C |C
    ------
    FOOTER

Comment · 16 years ago

> Can you explain that further?

Here's a stab: The culture here is such that comments are for the sake of the readers and not the writer. Some amount of self-promotion is fine, but too much is not appreciated.

Comment · 16 years ago

Sounds like Jamie Dimon, of JP Morgan Chase. He ended a multi-billion IT outsourcing deal with IBM in 2004:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/outsourcing/s...

Comment · 16 years ago

> Many Microsoft decisions since the mid-90s (when I first started holding MSFT) have made life overall worse for me

That has nothing to do with your being a shareholder.

Comment · 16 years ago

> Big corporations tend to operate in their stock's best interest, and this can still cause serious problems for their shareholders.

Erm, what? This seems contradictory on its face. The shareholder's only interest in a company is its stock performance, be it stock price or dividend payments. What sort of tendencies are you thinking of, here?

Comment · 16 years ago

The punchline is at the end:

> Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slanging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

Comment · 16 years ago

> don't the US corn subsidies for ethanol actually make corn more expensive?

My understanding is that the subsidies are there to incentivize corn production. The video says that the subsidized cost of corn production is actually negative -- that you can go plant a corn field and will have made money before you sell a single ear.

Once the corn is produced, if there are additional subsidies for ethanol production from corn, then that may divert corn from food uses. It may increase the cost of HFCS production.

But the cost of corn production is still lower despite, or perhaps even because of, the ethanol subsidies.

Comment · 16 years ago

> These are obviously mutually exclusive definitions!

Not at all. He is saying racism is a subset of tribalism, as is being an OS fanboy. Tribalism the the umbrella term.

Comment · 16 years ago

> However, the other counter argument against HFT is that it actually doesn't really provide liquidity to the market, as evident by the June flash-crash.

As far as I can tell, this is the only argument presented against HFT.

> But HFT dealers stopped trading that day, triggering a lot of people's stop-market orders

Are there other factors involved in this outcome, or is this a canonical HFT failure?

Comment · 16 years ago

> the researchers hypothesized that, given some premises about evolution, poor women would have more kids earlier.

Um, isn't this already well known? Did they not craft the hypothesis to fit their existing understanding?

> Then they went and tested it.

No comment.