akeefer

15 ms·

121.
by akeefer 16y ago
Sigh . . . I get that CPS doesn't always do the best job, and plenty of the people that work there are on a power trip and got into social work because they like telling other people what to do. The world would certainly be a better place
122.
by akeefer 16y ago
He's pointing out that the order of statements in the source code doesn't necessary correspond to the order of evaluation. In this case even though the function call is the last statement in the source code, it's actually an argument to th
123.
by akeefer 16y ago
Yeah, you definitely have a point there. While many problems have a high degree of inherent complexity, there are plenty of others that don't need to and that have features bolted on left and right to appeal to every possible market. And
124.
by akeefer 16y ago
He's right that the buyers not being the users is an issue, but there's far more too it than that. There are a lot of good answers already here, but to add a few more (and consolidate some others): 1) The developers often aren't the users
125.
by akeefer 16y ago
For many novice developers, web development imposes its own barriers to entry. First of all, you need some server somewhere, which means you need to know something about servers, maybe have some sysadmin skills, and likely that you'll have
126.
by akeefer 16y ago
But if the heavy users of their services are costing them more than they're making, and generally degrading the quality of the service, that argument doesn't really hold up. I'm going to assume that, like most similar business models (incl
127.
by akeefer 16y ago
My understanding is that many of them fled following the Cuban Revolution and subsequent nationalization of property; the ones who were in Cuba at the time are likely either very old or dead by now, but presumably their descendants still ha
128.
by akeefer 16y ago
Unfortunately there's a large, politically-influential group of Cuban exiles in Florida. In pretty much every recent presidential election cycle, Florida has been a crucial swing state that could go to either side, so neither party has wan
129.
by akeefer 16y ago
I've personally interviewed way, way too many people with impressive-looking CVs that couldn't code worth anything. Some people probably exaggerate their experience and some people I've seen end up in manager/"architect" roles that don't r
130.
by akeefer 16y ago
Well said. Lack of focus is often more of a danger to a company than lack of good ideas, and that goes double for startups.
131.
by akeefer 16y ago
Don't forget about audio. Even where the appropriate video output is available, many PC's lack any audio output other than a minijack.
132.
by akeefer 16y ago
I didn't start programming until college (aside from screwing around with my TI-85 when I was bored in class), and it hasn't really set me back at all. If it's something that makes sense to you and you can think algorithmically, you'll do
133.
by akeefer 16y ago
They broke in his door because no one was home, and they'll pay for the damage. That's pretty much SOP when executing a warrant. I believe that the contention of the police is that perhaps the facts aren't all public. They want to know ex
134.
by akeefer 16y ago
You honestly think that Apple would deliberately hamstring javascript performance on the iPad so that people have to use native apps? I think it's pretty ludicrous to think they'd do that: their sales of the iPad are directly, heavily aff
135.
by akeefer 16y ago
How exactly is that exclusion anti-competitive? Presumably Apple wants JS to be fast on the iPad just as much as anyone else does, and would only exclude something like that for a good reason.
136.
by akeefer 16y ago
Keep in mind that JDK7 (and a version of JDK6) is open sourced and GPL licensed at this point.
137.
by akeefer 16y ago
The discrimination against male nurses isn't overt, it's much more subtle: male nurses are the subject of jokes and people act as if there's something inherently effeminate and un-masculine about the profession. There's a general societal
138.
by akeefer 16y ago
It's a personal taste thing, honestly. Language features aren't free to users: as a user, you need to understand the behavior, so if there are two possible behaviors that's something else to learn. There are two different use cases here:
139.
by akeefer 16y ago
I think a clearer way to put the distinction is that in Ruby, blocks serve both as lambdas AND to let you define new control structures (that are thus analogous to for loops). Combining the two lets you do things that you can't do just wit
140.
by akeefer 16y ago
Ugh. I've always hated the non-local returns in Ruby blocks. They massively clutter up my mental model of a block as an anonymous function, where a return statement should return from the block's function, not the enclosing function. It s
141.
by akeefer 16y ago
I think it's a reasonable argument, but it's perhaps not stated as well as it could be. It's a response to the (presumed) justification from Apple that they want to do this because cross-compiled applications are often low-quality. So the
142.
by akeefer 16y ago
invokestatic is used for invocation of static methods, where there's no "this" pointer on the stack. By definition those calls are also statically dispatched. invokespecial is to statically-dispatch a call to a virtual method, and is used
143.
by akeefer 17y ago
From the list of partners, it looks like they're all basically either handset manufacturers or content providers, which is . . . interesting. Microsoft and Apple are noticeably absent, and not too surprisingly there aren't any Linux-relate
144.
by akeefer 17y ago
In general a well-reasoned article, but I don't really agree with the contention that private APIs should be removed: when you're shipping releases of something infrequently and you want to avoid breaking client code, APIs have to be somet
145.
by akeefer 17y ago
Arguing as a sometimes-utilitarian: people love their iPhones, and their creation has actually brought happiness into people's lives. In all this doom-and-gloom talk about how the iPad will destroy computing as we know it and Apple is the
146.
by akeefer 17y ago
It's not quite that black and white: essentially, the laws around "accredited investors" are there to clearly delineate professional investors from more casual investors so that the person receiving the money can be sure that it will count
147.
by akeefer 17y ago
Seems like an accurate statement . . . $20 per hour does, indeed, accurately reflect the importance of the position.
148.
by akeefer 17y ago
Sounds about right . . . any time you're solving a particular problem, things get a lot simpler. You need something to do x and y, so you make something do x and y, and it's pretty easy to tell whether what you've made sucks and x and y or
149.
by akeefer 17y ago
Making sure that some piece of software doesn't run afoul of an existing patent is basically impossible no matter how many billable lawyer hours you throw at the problem. You'll either come to the conclusion that everything has already bee
150.
by akeefer 17y ago
That "irrationality" is fundamental to many types of enterprise software, which is a big reason why most of it sucks. You're codifying hundreds of years of established precedent, often heavily legally regulated in slightly different ways b

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