a4isms

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601.
by a4isms 5y ago
A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen
602.
by a4isms 5y ago
“Worse is better:” https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
603.
by a4isms 5y ago
“Parallel Construction:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
604.
by a4isms 5y ago
“Rules for thee but not for me” is interesting when placed in juxtaposition with a famous quote from the software architect and composer Frank Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom
605.
by a4isms 5y ago
My mother had one installed in the moid-seventies, it was a nine-days wonder in the village (well, Toronto’s Little Italy pre-gentrification). She also had the hard-wired phone handsets rewired to use big, clunky four-prong plugs, so she co
606.
by a4isms 5y ago
"At either end of the social spectrum, there lies a leisure class.” —Yosemite golden-age climber Eric Jay Beck There are many ways to happiness, sometimes you can just go for it directly, sometimes you build some security on your way t
607.
by a4isms 5y ago
I’m not making claims about production graphics algorithms, but this gets really interesting if you consider using quad trees to represent images rather than bitmaps. The algorithm as presented turns the image into a quadtree as it works, f
608.
by a4isms 5y ago
Any right quadrangle of any dimensions can be rotated with this algorithm by padding it to become a square with 2^n pixels per side, rotating the square, and then removing the padding. The degenerate case is when the right quadrangle is alr
609.
by a4isms 5y ago
The “no code” and “low code” movements come up over and over again because programming is now like writing: Yes, it is its own profession, but also yes, it permeates all other professions as software eats the world. Languages and tools are
610.
by a4isms 5y ago
In this case, “equity” is the term I was after. Equality means treated the same as everyone else. Equity means participation, with the same roots as when we talk about common stock being “equity.” If management excluded everyone in sales f
611.
by a4isms 5y ago
I will summarize your reply as: 1. If it happened the way she says it happened, it’s her fault. She ought to have known how to deal with this. 2. Alternatively, she’s a lying, scheming, conniving woman. I have nothing else to say to you.
612.
by a4isms 5y ago
It’s not an either-or, she describes her female colleagues in other positions saying the same thing. In this case, Rivian got to brag that they poached a well-respected executive with experience managing sales for a small but high-status br
613.
by a4isms 5y ago
Performative inclusion. — Inclusion: A seat at the table. Equity: When you speak at the table, others listen.
614.
by a4isms 5y ago
Men’s neckties began as bibs. Then ornamentation took over, until they lost their original function. Much like a bird of paradise evolving long tail feathers that attract mates, but no longer keep it warm or help it fly.
615.
by a4isms 5y ago
“Ornament is Crime” —Modernism’s rallying cry, beginning with Adolf Loos in 1910. Are we still doing this debate a century later? I think for the most part, not. It’s fine to like ornament. It’s fine to prefer form that follows function. Bu
616.
by a4isms 5y ago
Patagonia was founded by Yvon Chouinard, one of the original Yosemite “Masters of Stone.” Nobody is above reproach, but he is generally regarded as a principled environmentalist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvon_Choui
617.
by a4isms 5y ago
The automobile analogy brings up another benefit of advertising. Items that are sold as socioeconomic status proxies don’t work unless everybody knows the brand. It’s not just that Volvo wants me to think I drive a safe wagon that is a sens
618.
by a4isms 5y ago
> In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the business. If you try to get direct access to
619.
by a4isms 5y ago
It is a false equivalence, and you just repeating it with more words and more appeals to emotion adds absolutely nothing of substance to this discussion. Your position of radical-simplification and reduction serves just one purpose: To let
620.
by a4isms 5y ago
"The USA is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” —Julius Nyerere, Tanzanian anti-colonial activist, politician, and political theorist
621.
by a4isms 5y ago
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there n
622.
by a4isms 5y ago
My favourite thing in this book is Guy’s injunction to build for passengers AND sailors. Make things that are familiar and offer good affordances for people who just pick it up and need to get something done. But also make room for those wh
623.
by a4isms 5y ago
This the same problem as interviewing people for a job nd collecting data about which “features” from interviews correlate with job performance… Without tracking the performance of any of the candidates who weren’t offered jobs—or turned do
624.
by a4isms 5y ago
When we use a system built around programming model X to implement programming model Y, and then write our program Z using model Y on top of model X, we are deliberately implementing the “Inner Platform Effect.” https://en.wikipe
625.
by a4isms 5y ago
You have touched on what is both the best and the worst thing about programming languages in 2021. On the one hand, most modern languages are powerful enough that you can build whatever you want on them. DSLs, constraint solving, pure FP, C
626.
by a4isms 5y ago
"I have a marvellous summary of all the ways a FAANG has systemic advantages over a startup, however the 8GB of RAM on my laptop is not sufficient to document it completely."
627.
by a4isms 5y ago
Previously, there were two kinds of developers: Those prohibited from doing this thing, and those—like Netflix—who were fellow oligopolists with enough leverage that Apple allowed them to do this thing. Regardless of what we may think of Ap
628.
by a4isms 5y ago
The nice thing about this question for old-timers is that we can recycle the answers we already heard about using Java for cross-platform desktop development from 20+ years ago. Or the rationale for using a cross-platform toolkit with C++ f
629.
by a4isms 5y ago
The precedent for building obedience by describing your organization as a “family” goes back a very long way. The most notorious example is probably The Family International, a cult founded in California in 1968: https://en.wikip
630.
by a4isms 5y ago
When creating an entertainment product, be it a movie or game, your user’s expectations are the canvas you paint on. In some places you deliberately violate them, in others you accommodate them at the expense of “realism.” An amusing exampl

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