Viewing profile — scott_meyer

Proof by contradiction requires finding a single contradiction. Practical utility just requires that contradiction be infrequent enough.

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.

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 …

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 bu…

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…

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 a…

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 depe…

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 a…

>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…

>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 …

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 …

Neither. Learn Scheme. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is still the best single book on computer programming: the most important concepts (closures, continuations…

Aside from what comes for free with "log-structured" there is no special treatment for temporal data.

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…

"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…

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 le…

Just watch this chart for a couple years: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

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 suc…

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 multipl…

Was that with or without a tip?

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 …

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 th…

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 f…

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 its…