gregcoombe
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
256
Submissions
47
Member since
Oct 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
He'll probably be relegated to some minor role like "Husband of Board Member #6"
Comment · 3 years ago
"It's one flag, Michael. How much could it cost, $44B?"
Comment · 4 years ago
Side story: the haptic feedback for the NanoManipulator was through a hydraulic system (kinda like this? https://www.sarcos.com/wp-content/uploads/history_5-339x280....). There were hydraulic lines that were piped through the building down to the machine room (where the SGI Infinite Reality Engine was!). Someone read through the manual and realized that the force that the arm was capable of could easily break someone's arm, and since it was usually grad students working late at night programming it, they decided it would be safest to just decommission that. I think I got one of the last demos during a UNC grad school recruiting event.
Comment · 4 years ago
Tolstoy also has a lot to share about programming. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is a clear recommendation to use status codes as return values instead of boolean success/fail.
Comment · 4 years ago
H3 has the significant downside that children nodes do not fit within parent nodes. So one needs to be very careful working within any sort of multi-resolution algorithm (the most effective uses I've seen are with a fixed resolution). S2 does not suffer from this.
Comment · 5 years ago
It's the office of the future! https://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/. The challenge in 2000 was that bandwidth and 3d reconstruction needed several leaps forward in quality.
Comment · 5 years ago
The Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to explaining that comment, under "Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation". He was forced out of the CEO position for this political view. It was a pretty significant news story, and I think they are right for including this as part of what he is known for (particularly outside the HN community).
Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah, it was a significant infrastructure cost. I heard at one time that the single largest computer at Google was the Perforce server. They ended up completely re-writing it (called "Piper") for scaling.
This is sort of what I was alluding to with my comment about Google having different concerns than many other companies. They can afford to dedicate a number of engineers to maintaining a monorepo system and then re-writing when it doesn't scale. That said, I personally believe that there are a lot of benefits to monorepos, and I think those tradeoffs are worth it for other companies too.
Comment · 6 years ago
Google posted a paper detailing their reasons for choosing monorepo: https://research.google/pubs/pub45424/
Caveat: your company probably isn't Google, so your challenges may be different.
Comment · 6 years ago
You can get a saliva test today, it's just a bit expensive: https://www.vaulthealth.com/covid
We did this this morning, and it was not bad. They ship the tubes to your house, and you get in a Zoom call to verify ID and do the procedure. They haven't worked out all the kinks (it took much too long to do all of us) but it was pretty convenient. The biggest issue? It's surprisingly hard to fill up an entire test tube with spit.
Comment · 6 years ago
"Hey, should I put this on my personal card?"
"No, just Brex-it!"