Viewing profile — tom_pinckney

Sellers and buyers can now use eBay Authenticate to get independent confirmation that goods are as authentic. It’s starting out just focused on certain types of handbags and luxury…

Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for th…

The idea is that you'd probably trust the guy who actually sold 1,000 dresses to Macys more than the guy who just says they're a great dress manufacturer.

Yeah, redis is pretty interesting. I think we'd have to add some sort of client side caching on top of it so that we're not fetching the same objects over and over. Tend to saturat…

Anything Stonebreaker does is interesting, but I don't know enough about VoltDB to have anything to say. Definitely curious where it goes.

memcached is a poor-man's distributed shared memory system for clusters. We've been layering on top of it to try and fix deficiencies with things like client-side caching, persiste…

In the name of completeness, there are also great packages like OpenMPI and OpenMP. At least for my particular applications, though, there's either 1) a steep learning curve for pr…

Yeah I didn't mean to sound like that's ALL there is. But I was time and again surprised how often buying decisions had nothing to do with the product, company's need etc. I guess …

I vowed after my first startup never again to build an enterprise product for this reason. Plus I don't like golfing and drinking with some random guy in Omaha trying to convince h…

Worth checking out pysco as well http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ Though in practice I find that if performance really matters using numpy or writing a C extension module usually work…

Definitely want to second the advice to use EXPLAIN. MySQL has a lot of very specific limitations about when it will and will not use the available indices. It also matters how you…

I guess I just object to paying Wilson $5k to run search-and-replace for me. And I certainly wouldn't trust LegalZoom to actually have documents written by people who understand st…

someone needs to build a web app that asks a few basic questions, gives you some check boxes to click and then generates all the standard PDFs you need for seed funding, employee a…

Points also to the issue that thinking about security from a perimeter point of view (everything outside firewall is bad, everything inside is good) is outdated. There is no inside…

Yeah, there are definitely Excel models, but personally I find it easier to think Python than Excel. Over time I think there's an interesting opportunity to simulate more what-if s…

Another great education OS is xv6 from MIT http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/xv6-book/index.html

If you're interested in building consumer products, using popular consumer products like Twitter is a must. It's just sort of expected that you have this background when you go tal…