Viewing profile — mcartyem

I can see how closures would take some work. Thanks. There's evidence garbage collection was not the desired solution but a plan B. McCarthy writes the reason reference counting wa…

(thank you for the willingness to write such a detailed response) There exists a point on the memory management continuum where management starts being more automatic (gc) than man…

There have been a lot of posts related to garbage collection lately but none of them touched upon what I see as a crucial issue: why is garbage collection needed to begin with? Cou…

I suspect a lot of companies use complicated tech for no reason. When using a database, even with the simpler case of not needing table joins at all, people shard databases and use…

What about it is a nightmare? Isn't storing, tracking, and managing billions of entries done directly in a database anyway?

This might be a silly thing to ask, but why don't they save their data in flat files on a shared filesystem? They wouldn't need Memcached, since the OS caches files anyway; replica…

This is great research, thank you.

The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery generally takes time. For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early twenti…

Many jobs are crappy because companies want guarantees. They would rather have peace of mind that things are moving at a known rate compared to any risk of uncertainty. The jobs ar…

Perhaps unbeknownst to you, you suggested that languages can be ranked, and that one of them stands out on top as best. You are almost right. There is one language that is the best…

How about: what's the most important thing people refuse to accept?

Mine is compilers. Which is another way of saying: automating; reducing the work I have to do manually.

I have a question about it: can anyone tell how it deals with redundancy? It seems to be distributed. If you are running Plan 9 on 3 machines, and one goes down, what happens to th…

An important variable not considered by this solution is who the author of a comment is.

Catering to people with special needs like the deaf & blind has to be one of the most untapped opportunities for a startup. The angle in is to build something the blind can use tha…

10% of the $34.6 billions Russians have parked in Cyprus is a lot of money. http://www.businessinsider.com/cyprus-bailout-russian-angle-... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-21…

On free time, it may be that the body assimilates what was learned during practicing. One accomplished musician believes: "Relaxation is necessary tension. Tension is unnecessary t…

Can you say in one sentence what it is that you built that doesn't already exist, and why it is important?

One challenge is to load balance programs that are not written in MPI, but instead written in your favorite language. i.e. to load balance a web app. RAMCloud is a way to bring bac…

Yes!