akeefer

19 ms·

331.
by akeefer 18y ago
I'd like to point out that this article completely ignores most specialty or enterprise markets. As a maker of insurance software, we employ some people who were former insurance agents/adjusters, but none of our developers are, and our on
332.
by akeefer 18y ago
There's no binary here between ignoring luck and fatalism, and most people inherently realize that even though luck is a factor the best they can do is improve their average result rather than completely controlling things. The best people
333.
by akeefer 18y ago
Agreed, static functions are (in my experience) much easier to test precisely because they generally have very explicit inputs and outputs, whereas instance methods are more likely to have "implicit" inputs in the form of object state and t
334.
by akeefer 18y ago
The personal attacks are obviously pretty off-base, given that companies like YCombinator actually help young hackers to actually retain more of what they create by taking a smaller initial percentage than traditional VCs would. I really d
335.
by akeefer 18y ago
That's a different argument than the one that was made in the article; the argument in the article, that Java isn't used for complicated projects and that engineers need to be able to debug compiler or processor bugs, is an incredibly poor
336.
by akeefer 18y ago
I totally agree that they shouldn't be vocational, I was just pointing out that the guy's arguments about what was useful for the job market were totally specious. I personally think schools should teach Computer Science instead of just Pr
337.
by akeefer 18y ago
I'm no fan of universities focusing just on Java programming either, but the contentions Dewar makes are completely ludicrous. Either he's deliberately distorting things to make his point or he's completely out of touch with real-world eng
338.
by akeefer 18y ago
I don't feel quite so bad now about not being able to solve the large input set on that problem.
339.
by akeefer 18y ago
There's too much money to be made for the VC community to not figure it out; either the IPO market will come back or we'll see something like an increasing number of private equity buyouts of tech firms so the VCs can close out their funds.
340.
by akeefer 18y ago
I'm not sure I agree . . . pointers in C throw people for a lot of loops, but aside from that the types are as simple as you'll let them be and I'm pretty convinced that most people have an easier time thinking in an imperative fashion than
341.
by akeefer 18y ago
It might be an unpopular position to take here, but I really think that what I think of as "language snob languages" (Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, OCaml . . . not Ruby or Python, though) can't ever be mainstream because the barrier to entry is ju
342.
by akeefer 18y ago
I don't think many people would debate what to do if you had the opportunity to sell at a huge markup (i.e. 40-80x your yearly take) that would leave you set for life. That's kind of a no-brainer. The real question, to me, is whether you s
343.
by akeefer 18y ago
It's basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without violating half a dozen completely absurd patents, and I don't think I've seen a legitimate software patent lawsuit in the last 10 years. There may be a few in the
344.
by akeefer 18y ago
Many of the people who contribute to Linux do so because they feel it's "the right thing" in some sense (though that can mean a lot of things). There's a lot to be said for network effects increasing the value of Linux for everyone, but fo
345.
by akeefer 18y ago
Metaprogramming is a sharp, sharp tool that many people are liable to cut themselves with - it does lead to hard-to-understand and hard-to-debug code, so you have to make sure the tradeoff is worth it. As with any such tool, you just need
346.
by akeefer 18y ago
The early reviews I've read seem to indicate that you will need to do that authorization. See: http://gizmodo.com/5014732/3g-iphone-first-hands-on "I noticed that the iPhone asked me for permission to give both the maps program and the c
347.
by akeefer 18y ago
I've had the same experience when writing, whereby my bad stuff was intertwined with my good stuff to the point where merely editing it was not worthwhile, and found that I need (at least) one draft to organize my thoughts before writing a
348.
by akeefer 18y ago
My philosophy professors actually did the opposite; the page limits were upper bounds, not lower bounds, and they were always incredibly tight. You might have 5 pages to cover what would reasonably take you 8, and if you went over the limi
349.
by akeefer 18y ago
Indeed, there's a real tension there between treating test as "real" code and letting them be separate. You end up getting bitten both ways, and we've gotten hit by all of them. Things can't all work the same, since if TestA and TestB sha
350.
by akeefer 18y ago
Having done TDD a bunch over the last five or so years, I couldn't ever go back to a world without extensive unit tests. That said, there are interesting scaling problems with tests that I don't feel like many people seem to write about or
351.
by akeefer 18y ago
My experience is that it's painful if you don't have any idea of what you're doing; it's not the testing itself per se but rather the fact that if you're iterating rapidly on the code your tests will need to be rewritten over and over again
352.
by akeefer 18y ago
In my experience the pitfalls of inheritance are something you have to really see for yourself in practice, so it generally takes even very good developers years to really develop the intuition around when to use inheritance and when to use
353.
by akeefer 18y ago
I remain unconvinced that software development will ever be able to make that kind of a titanic shift; people naturally think in serial and accomplish tasks in serial, and many programming tasks simply don't break down neatly into highly-pa
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by akeefer 18y ago
I look forward to "Software Factories" and the "pull based near/on-shore outsourcing model" to lead the next wave of failed consulting projects, continuing to leave the market open for those of us who still practice "craft-based development
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by akeefer 18y ago
I did the co-term at Stanford about 6 years ago, though my goal at the time wasn't to go start a company or freelance right away. I'm personally glad I did it, and not because of any resume-padding or salary-boosting (I already had a job a
356.
by akeefer 18y ago
Indeed, I work for the company you're thinking of (check out our development blog and you'll see me as the author of about 70% of the posts). Getting good people to work for a software company writing enterprise software is hard enough, due
357.
by akeefer 18y ago
Being that I build such systems for a living, from what I've observed you're pretty much right: the problems are boring in that they're not problems you the engineer care about solving, no one sees/cares about your work, and it's kind of a
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by akeefer 18y ago
I don't think you'll see it done with a web startup anytime soon . . . I've worked at a startup (not really a startup anymore) for 6 years that does software for the P & C insurance industry, and that sort of software is just an entirel
359.
by akeefer 19y ago
Before I went to college, I read a lot of philosophy, and I thought I was learning a lot. But there's a huge difference between reading Plato or Nietzche or Rawls or whatever else you like and having to write papers that critically analyze
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by akeefer 19y ago
It sounds like I'm one of a number of philosophy major who reads this site (and who works as a software engineer), and I'd like to second that philosophy can be a great major as long as you don't plan on being a philosophy professor (which,

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