The answer is you build a team that builds tools to make optimization easier for everyone in the engineering organization. One individual team can't optimize every application, but if you make it easy for every engineering team to profile their applications and debug performance problems, you've enabled every team to continuously optimize the low-hanging fruit. In effect, you're no longer solving one-off 8-figure problems, you're optimizing the time of other engineers which is something that pays off in perpetuity.
Good large engineering organizations have these teams, and understand their value. For smaller companies, it's not as clear if you can reasonably fund a team for that kind of work.
This Mill guy is the gift that keeps on giving. With any luck he’ll still be around to explain how the soon-to-be-released Mill 1.0 cpu would have avoided the year 2038 problem.
Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
But it isn't progressive, right? An individual in CA who makes 50k gets less in Federal funding to projects that would benefit them, than if that same individual moved to another state, and made the exact same amount.
Not saying I agree with the conceit that a state should have the level of economic autonomy argued for the the original post, but your argument doesn't hold water.
@falcolas -- I think you mean machine code not bytecode. And w.r.t. Mercurial afaik the project's hot paths are all written in Cython extensions, and there's ongoing work to improve the Python part by working with the PyPy folks. So, there's definite technical advantages in using Python for greater developer productivity, but there's also a cost.
There's no solid evidence that increasing the minimum wage will create fewer jobs. From Paul Krugman's review of Robert Reich's new book
> Other evidence points indirectly to a strong role of market power. At this point, for example, there is an extensive empirical literature on the effects of changes in the minimum wage. Conventional supply-and-demand analysis says that raising the minimum wage should reduce employment, but as Reich notes, we now have a number of what amount to controlled experiments, in which employment in counties whose states have hiked the minimum wage can be compared with employment in neighboring counties across the state line. And there is no hint in the data of the supposed negative employment effect.
> Why not? One leading hypothesis is that firms employing low-wage workers—such as fast-food chains—have significant monopsony power in the labor market; that is, they are the principal purchasers of low-wage labor in a particular job market. And a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more.
There's also something similar to your subsidy idea today called the Earned Income Tax Credit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit]. Guaranteeing a minimum income does seem like a promising idea, but it will probably have to be tried elsewhere before the U.S. will adopt it (if ever).
Thanks for the links, I'll have to take a look at that gdb/OCaml debugging video. Might as well dive into the OCaml internals a bit too. I just really wish OCaml would move to a fully threaded execution model instead of forcing evented systems on everyone.
> - the memory representation of values is uniform and native code debugging with gdb/lldb works great, thanks to the DWARF symbols emitted.
Besides being able to get a simple backtrace, I've always had nothing but headaches trying to print out variables. It's not tightly integrated with gdb, so the default "p my_ocaml_var" of course doesn't work and info locals rarely if ever works. Only time the debugging is good is when you get to the C code underlying the system calls.
I would love for this not to be the case, but I'm not sure if anyone is working on making OCaml better to debug in gdb.
OCaml is much more forgiving in letting you "cheat" and also being strictly evaluated makes OCaml easier to reason about performance for programmers used to strictly evaluated languages.
Do you have some back of the envelope calculations of cost of this versus satellite or extending copper wire? I'm fairly ignorant on the subject, but would love to hear more.