Justify that with actual math, please? I don't think you know how computers (processors, bus, memory access, etc) work. How exactly do you think an RDBMS can query an index at a hundred billion rows per second?
I'm the article's author. I don't think the headline HN chose is great but I don't mind if people have different interpretations of what I write. Hopefully all the commenters here are actually reading the original article and judging it on its merits (and flaws), right? right?
This is an excellent point. The distribution of the measurements are the distribution of the sample, not of the population. In my experience very few non-statisticians understand the difference. Statistics is hard.
I've been crossfitting for years at kylered's gym. I've also judged at the competition series he mentioned, and traveled and worked out at crossfit gyms all around the country.
I've seen some bad coaches, but I've seen a lot more people who are uncoachable and are going to injure themselves in any gym with any workout and any coach. I've never seen anyone vomit, injure themselves, get Rhabdo, pass out, or any of the other things people think are so common in Crossfit. Predictably, Crossfit haters sensationalize, and people who push themselves too hard and regret it tend to angrily blame Crossfit in public instead of themselves.
CrossFit changed my body, my self-image, and a lot of my attitude, but any other gym that's based on fun, positive encouragement from other members doing the same workout at the same time, variety, intensity, and a community of friends would do the same thing.
For the record I rarely "Rx" a workout and I almost always come away from workouts thinking I sandbagged it a little. And yet I'm very happy with my results. Why would I want to push harder and risk injury? I wouldn't. I insist on doing every movement perfectly, pausing or lowering weights or reps if I'm getting tired or winded to the point that my form might be at risk, taking it easy if I've had too little sleep or I'm dehydrated or whatever. I know a lot of people who have a similar philosophy and I admire their sense, not their hard-core-ness.
I don't buy the OP's claim that he got sick from a not-overly-strenuous workout. A Crossfit workout is no different than any other, except that if you overdo it in another style of fitness and get critically ill you don't get attention on Hacker News.
TL;DR - you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. You can show a guy good form and coach him to be safe but you can't make him be safe if he wants to get hurt.
I agree -- I dislike when important technical concepts are redefined for marketing purposes. It's a bit like lightweight marital fidelity, where your spouse is faithful to you in specific circumstances.
I'm a sometimes-coder at VividCortex. Yeah, there are endless potential issues with this that make it a non-general solution. I mean, it works for us -- so far -- but it's easy to find cases where it won't. What if package X wants version 1.0 of package Y, and package Z wants a different version? Oops.
IMO Moleskine is the Starbucks of notebooks. It's a crowded category, but for me, the Leuchtturm is the clear standout for quality and fit-and-finish, head and shoulders above the Moleskine.
Yes, the Whitelines notebook is a little bit self-promotional. It makes sure you don't forget that you're holding a Swedish, patented, revolutionary notebook.
It's tough to give examples of this in Perl without a lot of narrative (and sometimes a lot of code), but the technique I'm referring to is currying: programs that write programs, via functions that write functions. This, of course, is what you do all the time in LISP. It takes half the (Higher-Order Perl) book to illustrate the technique and its power. Which is kind of the point: shouldn't it be a commonplace thing that doesn't take so much work to get around to explaining and using?