akeefer

91 ms·

271.
by akeefer 17y ago
As a guy who works at an enterprise vendor that works very, very hard to never lie in the sales cycle . . . in the long run, having a reputation as a vendor that delivers on their promises is a huge asset. Most enterprise software vendors
272.
by akeefer 17y ago
The real problem is that once you get past very common sorts of things (e-mail, IM, word processing) the needs of different customers start to become different enough that building a single product with no extensibility/customizability beco
273.
by akeefer 17y ago
The point is that the poor pay more for exactly the same (or even inferior) things as people who are better off, not that they somehow spend more in the aggregate. People who already are going to have less than others because of their lowe
274.
by akeefer 17y ago
I've also seen companies fail precisely because the founders were unwilling to give up any control. They may have thought they were choosing between 100% of 10 million and 5% of 200 million, but by being unwilling to give up any control
275.
by akeefer 17y ago
The problem is that there's a lower bound on what government can spend and still be effective. If a business has to cut jobs, that affects that business and those people, and if the business dies as a result of that revenue shortage or from
276.
by akeefer 17y ago
It would be a far more compelling argument if there were actual numbers in there showing that for those kinds of loads Java does in fact require more wattage; for long-running processes, once the VM has JITed everything down to machine code
277.
by akeefer 17y ago
Since they're backward looking statistics they actually track what happened before the dot com boom. They still might not be relevant given the current marketplace, of course.
278.
by akeefer 17y ago
That's a classic; his recent work is pretty good too. I really enjoyed both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.
279.
by akeefer 17y ago
That entirely depends on how you define "the poor" and how you quantify benefits. Is the military a social program? Police? National defense? How do you quantify one person's portion of that? If we're talking purely about direct social
280.
by akeefer 17y ago
Doesn't your 10-15% ignore social security and medicare taxes?
281.
by akeefer 17y ago
I was disagreeing with your statement "It isn't a fallacy that the poor don't pay taxes." It very much is a fallacy; they pay all kinds of taxes (as pointed out by the other commenter they pay medicare tax and social security tax as well a
282.
by akeefer 17y ago
Um, perhaps actually enumerating what X and Y are would be a start? Or defining what "poor" means? A lot of people conveniently forget about sales tax (and potentially other sorts of government fees, like vehicle registration fees) when sa
283.
by akeefer 17y ago
Depends if you're a believer in the "genetic lottery" (to use John Rawls's term) or not. If you believe that things like catastrophic accidents or health conditions have a large amount of "luck" involved in them, then morally speaking it's
284.
by akeefer 18y ago
Scaling from one end of the performance/team size/code size scale to another using a single language is a very difficult problem no matter what language you choose. Things like static type checks that get in your way at one end of the spec
285.
by akeefer 18y ago
I don't know too much about LLVM, but the JVM has a ton of advantages: it's pretty much universally available on all platforms, it uses a fairly trivial set of instructions that make learning the instruction set and using it fairly easy, t
286.
by akeefer 18y ago
Anonymous inner classes aren't really closures in the more traditional sense, since they require that the captured variables be final; that makes them more restricted than closures generally are in other programming languages. That might n
287.
by akeefer 18y ago
It might not be impossible for everyone, but it's certainly a huge disincentive, and not everyone has the skills or energy to hold down another job that actually pays the bills, or to contract out. On top of that, many internships (like in
288.
by akeefer 18y ago
In general, any sort of unpaid internship biases against people who aren't well enough off to work for free (i.e. whose parents won't support them while they do). It's really a kind of class discrimination that prevents people from lower s
289.
by akeefer 18y ago
I'm a fan of Belgian-styles ales. At the moment, my favorites are La Fin Du Monde (actually made in Quebec), Golden Draak, and Gouden Carolus d'Or (Red). For more regular bottled beers my favorites are probably Leffe, Hoegaarden, Blue Moo
290.
by akeefer 18y ago
The company I'm with was founded literally right after September 11th, then funded in early 2002; basically at the nadir of the original tech bubble. But it had exactly the effect that you've described; there was no hurry to make a land gr
291.
by akeefer 18y ago
Microsoft did an internal study you might find interesting: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/abegel/papers/... I also know that they sponsored research by the Stanford CS department where they gave pairs and individuals the s
292.
by akeefer 18y ago
Sure, but people rent movies for $4 without knowing if they'll like it, based solely on reviews. They buy wine they've never had before for $5 or $10. They order food for $5 or $10 or $50 from restaurants they've never been to before. Pe
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by akeefer 18y ago
The one sad thing about the app store is that people are now conditioned to expect that applications that take hundreds or thousands of man-hours to develop should be available for less than the cost of a cup of coffee . . . people that wou
294.
by akeefer 18y ago
The solution to that in our case, at least, is that the stories aren't just handed down with no explanation from a product manager. Instead, there's a team-wide "estimation session" every week where everyone (dev, PM, and QA) attends and w
295.
by akeefer 18y ago
One important distinction that a lot of agile people make is more around writing down the specs; as the PM you still do work up front to think about what to do, make mockups, do your homework, etc., but when it comes time to communicate to
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Empirical studies show test driven development improves quality(infoq.com)
1 points by akeefer 18y ago|0 comments
297.
by akeefer 18y ago
Well, I work at a shop that builds software, but it's installed enterprise software, which means we don't fully control the deployment platform and have to support multiple databases. Control of the deployment model is definitely a huge, h
298.
by akeefer 18y ago
If you're using a config file to define things, it's generally the case that it's defining the schema as well and the database is built programatically on top of it. So it's really just a matter of taste: some frameworks have you manipula
299.
by akeefer 18y ago
What he's imagining is somewhat close to what we do with our currently-internal (hopefully open source some day) ORM framework (which is on Java). Our schema is defined as metadata in XML, and we build a checksum off the XML to compare aga
300.
by akeefer 18y ago
I've thought a lot about why technical debt seems to be such a hard concept for non-engineers to grasp; certainly given how few business people or managers seem to understand it, it clearly must be difficult. I think it's because A) it onl

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