akeefer

24 ms·

151.
by akeefer 17y ago
Sure, but there will always be people who want or need a great site not just a site (or even a pretty good site), and the former will probably always be much harder than the latter and demand some amount of skill no matter how good fr
152.
by akeefer 17y ago
Huh. I've used IntelliJ on Windows for close to 8 years and never noticed any font rendering issues.
153.
by akeefer 17y ago
What platform did you use IntelliJ IDEA on? I work with about 100 other (highly opinionated) developers that all use it, and I've never once heard someone complain about the font rendering.
154.
by akeefer 17y ago
It'll be interesting to see whether the negative impact of employers trying to stay below 50 FTE employees is offset by the positive impact of people feeling more free to start or join small businesses that don't yet offer health coverage b
155.
by akeefer 17y ago
Preexisting conditions are a huge issue, though; if the insurance companies dig hard enough (which they do) they can find a reason to deny almost anyone a policy. Do you have high blood pressure? High cholesterol? A low-functioning thyro
156.
by akeefer 17y ago
The Eastern District of Texas is particularly notorious for being very favorable to plaintiffs in patent lawsuits (it's even specifically called out in the Wikipedia article on patent trolls), so it's notable that this happened in Texas bot
157.
by akeefer 17y ago
I believe that the law is there to prevent companies from calling ordinary employees "interns" for the sake of getting around minimum wage laws.
158.
by akeefer 17y ago
I'm a fan of clearly-delineated lines of argumentation since it's difficult to have a debate if people just talk past each other. It's much more fruitful if you can really pinpoint exactly where it is that you disagree with the other perso
159.
by akeefer 17y ago
One particular example doesn't make for a very compelling argument. The vast majority of software patents (probably above 99% of them) are A) never followed up with scientific papers, B) represent nothing that someone else trying to solve
160.
by akeefer 17y ago
The key reason that works for you, which is the same conclusion I've come to from my personal experience, is rejecting the "unit" part of the unit testing dogma. My personal catchphrase is "test at the highest level of abstraction possible
161.
by akeefer 17y ago
The point of a top-tier university education in CS is much more the theoretical side of things (lambda calculus, graphics theory, np-completeness, algorithms, discrete math, etc.), which most people are less likely or able to pick up on the
162.
by akeefer 17y ago
Exactly: the incentives are wrong for everyone under an insurance model. Healthier people have an incentive to leave the risk pool and/or only keep catastrophic coverage, increasing premiums for everyone less fortunate. Insurance companie
163.
by akeefer 17y ago
The JVM is a great platform if the language in question is relatively close to Java, and you're just layering on higher-level syntax like closures. (Sure, it would be nice if Java supported them, but they're not hard to implement as anonym
164.
by akeefer 17y ago
Guidewire Software in San Mateo is still hiring developers (and QA and product managers), primarily on the more senior side at this point. Applications are written in a mix of Java and our C#-ish JVM language called Gosu (open sourcing lat
165.
by akeefer 17y ago
I think the analogy there is pretty inaccurate: businesses do cut back on services they offer when their revenue decreases. If business A loses half their revenue, it's probably because they've lost half their customers, meaning they're
166.
by akeefer 17y ago
It's an important life skill to learn to differentiate between when you need a decision and when you need the right decision. Applying the wrong strategy to either situation tends to work out poorly.
167.
by akeefer 17y ago
Let's take it as a given that the iPad and like devices won't kill normal computers any time soon, if ever, so those of us who know we want to tinker will have a place to do it. The question, then, is if one is designing a mass-market compu
168.
by akeefer 17y ago
I don't think the opportunity is lost, it's just that none of the big companies are taking advantage of it. Honestly, I think that's because they think it's too hard. Microsoft and Apple have been trying for decades at this point to make
169.
by akeefer 17y ago
Apple, at least, claims they don't make much money there. Per their latest quarterly call: "iTunes and App Store are still running 'a bit over break-even.' We’re investing a lot in these stores – that’s where the revenue is going." http
170.
by akeefer 17y ago
I think it's perfectly clear why they're doing this: because they think it provides a better consumer experience. That, in turn, is what translates into more money and more sales. (I believe they said on their conference call earlier thi
171.
by akeefer 17y ago
To put it in a different context, a lot of people (myself included, and I'm a hardcore techy) prefer to play video games on consoles rather than PCs so as to avoid dealing with all these headaches. You want to just put the game in, press p
172.
by akeefer 17y ago
I'm guessing their target market for the iPad won't really care too much about that; plenty of non-technical laptop users already have enough trouble installing/uninstalling software, so something like the app store that makes it easy to fi
173.
by akeefer 17y ago
$499 for the base model makes it a whole lot more attractive than the $800-$1000 a lot of us were expecting . . .
174.
by akeefer 17y ago
One primary difference is that libraries have real scarcity; they only have so many copies of any given book, only so many books in total, and a limited timeframe for borrowing. That's most important for new releases, where the number of p
175.
by akeefer 17y ago
It just happened to my wife this weekend: she'd written a review of her trainer that showed up at the time, but at some point in the last few months it disappeared from the trainer's page, even though it still appears within her profile.
176.
by akeefer 17y ago
I would then argue that REST and XML-RPC fit in different niches and solve different problems, even if there's some substantial overlap between them, so people like the OP that argue that REST completely obviates the need for XML-RPC is mis
177.
by akeefer 17y ago
I'm not much of a fan of the bloat that SOAP has acquired, but to me the point of something XML-based isn't so much the transport side but instead the API-publishing side. The point of a WSDL or similar descriptor is to define what's avail
178.
by akeefer 17y ago
Keep in mind that it's not just because of the studios: it's also because of the various TV networks that the studios have signed exclusive re-broadcast deals with. That's why Netflix sublicensed the Starz's rebroadcast rights, and why
179.
by akeefer 17y ago
I totally agree . . . I really don't pay any attention to DVD for-sale dates, and only pay attention to the date it's available according to my Netflix queue. It's already the case that the time from theatrical release to DVD seems to vary
180.
by akeefer 17y ago
Compiling our JVM language (Gosu) down to bytecode. It's slow going; the bytecode side isn't hard, but the language has been evolving for 7 years or so and has all sorts of obscure edge cases, as well as some looseness in the semantics tha

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