MSSQL is easier to optimize at last for me than say Sybase and Oracle, which I also supported.
People can bash MS as much as they want but their products are dirt simple to use and for the most part efficient. MSSQL comes with some query plan analysis so you can look at hit and miss ratios. From this info you can make some decisions as to add additional clustered or non-clustered indexes or use stored procedure which are saved (preprocessed) for faster execution. I forgot which of the several books I used to do this. But I was pleasantly surprised at the performance increase with my occasional tweaking.
Performance was not a priority for us that is why it was done occasionally. Not my call. My main job was make sure replications happened effectively, maintain good restores and security, and create stored procedures and triggers.
I hated the ORM in Rails. I do not want magic when I know how to do it more efficiently. For example there are certain times it is better to use DISTINCT versus GROUP BY for unique values.
I miss MSSQL. I use MySQL and it is ok but not like my sweetie and, thank you, not like the ugly gorilla Oracle.
People wonder why "women" find certain fields distasteful. came to HN: Number one topic for comments - about a "Woman".
Why say she is a woman? Depressing. Is it required? No it is just to stress the fact that women are stupid and perhaps deceitful than men. Yet my empirical suggests otherwise. So sad HN.
He said "woman" because it is the most frequently used term for "female human". [1]
Maybe it's just my poor english skills, but I see nothing implying that the woman was stupid in the title, not even some kind of subtle feminist-troll-bait. If anything, the title was suggesting that charging 200k for any amount of data one person could download with conventional hardware is ridiculous.
So could you kindly explain in simple words for the poor brain-atrophied male human I am[2], what in this title could be read as "women are stupid" and not as "a poor soul got screwed by a greedy telecom operator and an uninformed judge" ?
[2] Feel free to use this confession for a generalization about all men being stupid, I am sure we will all find it very amusing and some sarcasm-fu masters might even generalize in response that all feminists are paranoid.
I agree that it doesn't matter, but it's entirely conventional for "Man" / "Woman" to be used in news story headlines, so your charges of sexism are silly.
I used to worship institutions such as Bell Labs. But I guess when you learn how the sausage is made, it takes the luster off of things.
The book, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, talks about why he left Bell Labs to be a quant on wall street.
I remember after graduating college. I was unsure what to do next. My profs wanted me to do PhD. My fiancee, a PhD candidate, was against it. The company I worked at was willing to pay for my masters in electrical engineering but again my fiancee made the argument since I was repulsed by large organizations that I would resent it. I would most likely end up working for those companies. He was right. This is what happened to my friends.
5 years ago, I was reconsidering a PhD, I thought comp sci or stats. So I dipped my toe and got a masters in stats - it was fun. Do a PhD? No. What for. Economically it would not make sense for me.
I would only do it if I found a fun topic such as modeling detection of prostate cancer (my masters project) but so far the idea of working for the immoral pharma industry including the unis and rest of them makes me ill.
I wish I learnt Marie Curie's secret on how to focus on the work and forget the rest. But I haven't.
My husband works as a computer science researcher (AI) - I KNOW I never want to do this. Pittance for ground breaking work done at excruciating slow pace with so many failures. The shit he puts up so he can work on the stuff that interests him - boggles the mind. I almost want to scream - get a bloody commercial job (effectively 2x salary) and use your own money to run your own tests. But he has seen what the prospects and the environment through the eyes of friends smarter than him and knows the true cost of politics. Smart man.
I would never advise anyone to do a PhD unless you are in love with the topic.
I absolutely agree - any one of the Bell Labs scientists could easily have become a multi-millionaire by choosing a different path. Financially, they saw only an infinitesimal fraction of the value they created.
In one corner, we have engineers and scientists whose full time job is to solve problems and create new ideas; in the other corner, we have those whose full time job is to acquire money in any way possible - executives, Wall Street types, etc. It is easy to guess who will emerge financially victorious. Sadly, I don't think it can be any other way.
There is a company that kinda does this already - say you are going be in SF next week. And your friends also marked on their calendars they are visiting SF - you can actually see them on a "future radar" so you schedule a meetup with them. Kinda cool?
coloci helps friends share their future and current trips, activities, travel plans and meetup face to face when they are in the same location or vicinity
I've tried using Evernote and Dropbox, but could never make it work the way I wanted hence the motivation to work out keeping note in an ordered way in my notebooks.
I go up and down a step - 50 times twice every hour. Unlikely stairs - you get little help from momentum and so burn more calories. Plus I raise my arms up and down at the same time. Looks silly but - it works.
easy to remember, easy to do, quick burst of energy; but don't get sweaty
Also - do wall pushups (25 at a shot) for 300 a day. As well as squat: hold for 1 min, every hour. Can do in bathroom or stairwell for privacy.
I can not recall that exact title of the book something about ants and elephants (looked on amazon - did not recognize those books) but these are my takeaways from it:
1. state your goals
2. write down your milestones - must be actual measurable metrics
3. write reasons why you will not reach them - expect the unexpected; yes you can not expect all the unexpected but this is preparing you so that when there are issues, which are guaranteed to happen, this is how you need to respond without your emotions totally taking over.
4. Write down what you will do when you encounter these problems. Again be specific. Think of this a as a recipe book/play book.
5. write down the rewards you will give to yourself for each milestone achieved. You need to put a positive feedback loop as incentive. Worked in kindergarten with goldstars.
6. and from the another book: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
answer the 2 Qs:
Do I think I can do it? (meaning skills and resources)
1. How certain are you that you *want* to do it?
2. How certain are you that you *can* do it?
3. How certain are you that you *will* do it?
If your answers are "absolutely", "definitely", and "given historical
evidence, not entirely" then this is classic akrasia.
I think the only solution in that case is some form of self-binding.
See http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia
Here is a nice synopsis of a case studied in the Influencer book about the Carter Center helping to rid Guinea worm infections in several African countries:
http://www.joshhunt.com/mail215.htm
I have problem accepting your conclusion from your blog:To make the long-term consequences of failing at your goal immediate, you need a bright and painful line.
I think it more complex than that, which you alluded to earlier. I am constantly trying to be a better me. Losing money would not be an incentive to me if milestones were not met as you recommended.
The book, "Change or Die", talks about Dick Cheney needing a yearly heart bypass and then finally getting $6M/invested in chefs/fitness trainers/doctors/retrofitted planes to change himself (basically to exercise 1 hour a day). This is even before his recent massive weight loss.
It also talks about, people with fatal diseases that refuse to take their daily meds as required. Why? I mean it is fatal. They will die.
Taking the pill every day made them realize they were dying. Forgetting to do so, made them have a happier less depressing day. I guess quality versus quantity. In this case if the pill was somehow better integrated, so they would not notice it much and reflect so much, they might consistently take it.
Also, you may have already seen this, Sendhil Mullainathan's, "THE IRONY OF POVERTY" http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge263.html in which he talks one such problem diarrhea causing infant deaths and how to successfully change the mental model of the parents to save infant lives.
I have not yet read PG's essay.The Wikipedia article was a nice read. Thanks!
PS There are some interesting books on how train and change behaviors in animals since I think in end we more like animals than we care to admit.
The smoking issue was interesting. In the book, Lady Drinking Tea, which explores how modern statistics came to be (BTW excellent read - fun), RA Fisher, the father of modern statistics, argued that lung cancer and smoking were correlated and you can NOT determine causation based on that.
For 60 years this smoker attacked everyone who disagreed. He was brilliant but still an asshole. He died from lung cancer, apropos. Soon after smoking was targeted again as a cause for lung cancer and many lives were saved since Fisher was no longer there attacking them.
I tried putting "gold" and it kept going back to spa.
I would remove the e.g. or eg; just put the item that you think your ideal customer would look for.
You might create an array with several and randomly populate the value field so each time they come they see a new suggestion of items to search.
Also why not start with the main page that already has a item searched, then the person can change it. This way I can see what you have to offer. It also gets me thinking of what I might want to search for:
http://www.dealites.com/search/delhi-ncr/?phrase=jewelry
I love the counter.
Your design has a good feel to it; I love the name. Good job! Do you have a marketing strategy?
People can bash MS as much as they want but their products are dirt simple to use and for the most part efficient. MSSQL comes with some query plan analysis so you can look at hit and miss ratios. From this info you can make some decisions as to add additional clustered or non-clustered indexes or use stored procedure which are saved (preprocessed) for faster execution. I forgot which of the several books I used to do this. But I was pleasantly surprised at the performance increase with my occasional tweaking.
Performance was not a priority for us that is why it was done occasionally. Not my call. My main job was make sure replications happened effectively, maintain good restores and security, and create stored procedures and triggers.
I hated the ORM in Rails. I do not want magic when I know how to do it more efficiently. For example there are certain times it is better to use DISTINCT versus GROUP BY for unique values.
I miss MSSQL. I use MySQL and it is ok but not like my sweetie and, thank you, not like the ugly gorilla Oracle.
In smaller apps I use sqlite or flat files.