Stanislav Shalunov › Comments

Too bad it doesn't recognize even the simplest phrases. Think worse than Google Voice transcription quality. Or maybe a secretary from a different planet and with an IQ of 70. - Stanislav Shalunov

See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

I'll be there from November 6th until November 14th. See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

Wall Street banks make $1B/month each getting money from one Federal Reserve account at 0% and putting it into a few others (with leverage) at 2%. Nice scheme. - Stanislav Shalunov

Yahoo+MSN time shrank 3 times since 2006, displaced by Facebook and YouTube. - Stanislav Shalunov

The plan is through TracFone, which has no network of its own, but instead has contracts with every major cell phone company. A jailbroken iPhone should conceivably work on the plans. - Stanislav Shalunov

The plan is through TracFone, which has no network of its own, but instead has contracts with every major cell phone company. A jailbroken iPhone should conceivably work on the plans. - Stanislav Shalunov

Retail walk-in clinics are cheapest for routine illnesses and just as good as other settings. ER is worst and most expensive. - Stanislav Shalunov

"Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time." - Stanislav Shalunov

Besides Mexico, New Zealand is an excellent comparison. New Zealand government spends less on health care per capita than the US government, but people live longer. - Stanislav Shalunov

"If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to gestapo@whitehouse.gov." - Stanislav Shalunov

Isn't an agreement not to hire from each other a cartel to suppress salaries? - Stanislav Shalunov

See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

I'll be there from July 25th until July 31st. See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

"The network with an effective 40% loss rate is quite unusable. The network with an effective (round-trip) 5% loss rate is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, still effectively unusable for any interactive app. Consider an HTTP request that gets 20kB of data. Without loss and without cached ssthresh, this will take five RTTs not counting the FIN exchange. (One for SYN/SYNACK, and then four for the 14 data packets, with slow start doubling the window at every RTT and sending an incomplete last window.) Consider a web page. A very minimalistic one might take 25 RTTs (include some DNS and a picture or two and maybe a stylesheet). With objects this short, fast retransmit can't work. (HTTP/1.1 running over TCP with real SACK support could help a bit here, but let's get back to this universe.) Assuming uncorrelated loss, that's 72% probability of going into timeouts, which will dominate the total user-experienced delay. You want 99th or 99.9th percentile for what you're trying to do, unless the..." - Stanislav Shalunov

Google already gets a slice of most net transactions based on existing demand. Now they want a slice from the demand generation pie. - Stanislav Shalunov

Money managers expect recovery in 2010 and being back to normal in 2011. Can I have some of what they're smoking? The derivatives remain unresolved, banks still need to be recapitalized. And now the government is gonna blow a trillion up a wild hog's ass. - Stanislav Shalunov

Twitter could make commercial accounts easier to find and follow, effectively running ads for Twitter accounts. How much would companies pay for followers? - Stanislav Shalunov

Web services need a better way to deal with data. With scalable writes and automatic history. - Stanislav Shalunov

Shopping and gifts spending at all-time high for Mint users. - Stanislav Shalunov

Merrill Lynch executives stole $3-4B of the TARP money in December. - Stanislav Shalunov

"PHP is easier to deploy, you're right. By change I meant substantial requirements change. Suppose you build a blog platform, then decide you actually want to add a social network on top. Migrations in Rails make this easier. Does this make sense?" - Stanislav Shalunov

"Nivi, thank you. Because free ideas and reasoning are more useful than free advice, I try to provide reasoning. As a side effect, it helps articulate the assumptions." - Stanislav Shalunov

"Perl has lost mindshare. Five years ago, you'd bet any CPAN module would at least *compile*. When I last moved a Perl app, that was no longer the case. We later rewrote the app and stayed with Perl (I argued for staying then, and still believe it was the right choice). I didn't recommend Cake, Django, or Catalyst as options. Rails is the original and just as free. Googlefight [ruby rails] and [perl catalyst] for a rough measure of mindshare." - Stanislav Shalunov

"Rails isn't just a framework. It's the killer app for Ruby, and it got cloned into every other web dev language. You can DYI if you care about making tools, but you shouldn't if you care about making apps." - Stanislav Shalunov

"amidst all the economic gloom, online retailing continued to boom" - Stanislav Shalunov

"My sample size is well over a million of users of my apps, which range from very serious to lightweight to utterly giggly. Yours is two dozen former classmates. Giggly users are by far more viral. The post was meant for fellow developers and to Facebook. For what it's worth, developers who made apps used by vast majority of Facebook users agree with me, but Facebook obviously didn't. At this point, it's history. P.S. I went to the best school there was in Soviet Union, which was not open for foreign travel. My stint in Wisconsin grad school was boring -- I passed the PhD quals before the first semester started. At least I did math, not acoustics and baseball." - Stanislav Shalunov

"Look at the difference in phrasing. It's not accidental. "Has a heavy tail" is a precise statement about the hypothetical underlying distribution from which the samples are drawn -- that this distribution has an infinite deviation. "Tail is relatively heavy" is a quantitative statement about the empirical distribution -- that a good chunk of the total delay comes from a few samples. This sure looks to be the case in the data that I've seen. The mean can have its advantages -- obviously mean(x+y) = mean(x) + mean(y) is an important property, with nothing corresponding for the median, which needs a convolution here. So I don't say that median it universally better, only that it's better for network delay. Similar considerations apply to many other sample sources, of course." - Stanislav Shalunov

See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

I'll be there from November 14th until November 21st. See more in my Dopplr profile. - Stanislav Shalunov

"Gigabit Ethernet is the current cheapest last-mile technology for new installations and continues to be. For short distances (under 300 meters), one could even use multimode fiber. My friend and I prepared technical documentation of how to accomplish what I describe here for the Internet2 testimony at the US Senate net neutrality hearings. This withstood expert scrutiny during intense debate. The relationship between the amount of the Internet traffic and the capacity of a single fiber strand is surprising, but no reason to be rude. One strand of fiber can carry, with DWDM technology that became commercially available at the turn of the century, 160 wavelengths at 10Gb/s each. Currently, one could do a few times better, for example, by lighting the wavelengths with 40Gb/s OC-768 instead of OC-192. This was still cutting edge when the article was written, and so I assumed OC-192. That's 1.6Tb/s. This exceeds Internet traffic in 2006 -- see Andrew Odlyzko's Minnesota Internet Traffic..." - Stanislav Shalunov