angelbob

70 ms·

661.
by angelbob 17y ago
You truly believe that no matter what you try to get good at, it's equally good? I agree that you need to get past the initial total incompetence, but redefining "passion" to mean "something you worked on for a long time" is ignoring or den
662.
What's Surprising about Wikis as a Technical Documentation Medium?(idratherbewriting.com)
1 points by angelbob 17y ago|0 comments
663.
by angelbob 17y ago
"What he's saying is that you can pick any of your superficial interests (the things that you want or like) and construct a passion from it by getting really good at it." Yes. That's what he saying. That you can pick any of those intere
664.
by angelbob 17y ago
Sure, but "sometimes" without any particular predictive ability isn't very helpful. I suppose he could be saying "before you done something for awhile, you probably won't like it." That would be a statement with more content. It's a diffe
665.
by angelbob 17y ago
You could rephrase the whole article, "Just do anything enough to get good at it. It doesn't matter what you want or like." My response: "yes, it really does."
666.
by angelbob 17y ago
This is fabulously done. While some of the pointer types are pretty verbose, they have nice abbreviations for many of them, and the "let" statement is just brilliant. So basically, the verbose pointer types mean that when you're doing some
667.
by angelbob 17y ago
C's not dead, but I agree with the article's author: its use will slowly erode, but never get to zero. It'll bottom out at a fairly steady, low rate, rather like COBOL.
668.
by angelbob 17y ago
In my experience, companies never honor excellent performance, but it looks really good when asking for a higher salary with the next company.
669.
by angelbob 17y ago
Usually it annoys me that I edit my blog post with narrow (editing HTML) margins, then see it at full width after I hit "post". As he points out here, even a little trick like that does make it easier to edit. And I do manage to find a
670.
by angelbob 17y ago
The article references the book "Impro". I agree -- it has a really fabulous chapter on status, and how to use it in interaction. While the book is focused on improvisational theater, the exercises they do will teach you a lot about how p
671.
Easy Partials in Rails(smellsblue.blogspot.com)
2 points by angelbob 17y ago|0 comments
672.
by angelbob 17y ago
It's possible Scalzi's being contrarian to be contrarian. He's known as a bit of a grump, among other things. However, you could make the whole thing more useful to you by reading his article as "you may need a lot more fans if you're in a
673.
by angelbob 17y ago
Having the ability to do something doesn't mean it'll be focused that way or convenient to use that way. Look at Twitter and say: "why won't blogging kill this?" Part of the answer is focus: they're making some things easy, not just poss
674.
by angelbob 17y ago
I'm not the poster you replied to, but it's a very good book on both how to be happy (somewhat) and when you're most likely to be happy (most of the book, and most of the examples). It's short on hard research, but provides a lot of good ge
675.
by angelbob 17y ago
While his specific tool examples are excellent, I agree most with his point that, whatever your tools, you need to love them more than is really healthy ;-)
676.
by angelbob 17y ago
GPGPU stuff -- that is, using your graphics processor for random programming tasks. While something like <a href=" http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html>CUDA</a&... ; reduces the need to write assembly-like code, it also
677.
by angelbob 17y ago
In many cases it can, but then you have to be sure that it keeps doing so. You can write test cases for that, but in many cases it's easier to verify by just using the instructions directly. If you don't write the compiler, you have to mak
678.
by angelbob 17y ago
One solution to this is that you can measure similar projects. "The Mythical Man-Month" is based on this idea. If you compare large projects to large projects (or a large project to itself with different methods, different number of peopl
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How Nokia Learned to Love Openness(computerworlduk.com)
3 points by angelbob 17y ago|0 comments
680.
by angelbob 17y ago
The Hacker News title here is the opposite of the one on the article itself.
681.
by angelbob 17y ago
One thing I had to work hard to figure out is that I code in two different ways, and I need to alternate them. They are physically incompatible -- I can only be doing one or the other in a given hour or so. One of these is design. When de
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by angelbob 17y ago
Fluid layouts are a reasonable compromise, but they mean a layout that's slightly "off" in many cases. Look at how GTK+ scales on different mobile devices, for instance. It works, but it means giving up a lot of control, and the results te
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by angelbob 17y ago
This is a really powerful point. Observation and commentary help a lot -- reading other people's blogs, and comments on mine. The process of preparing what I've done for somebody else's consumption is probably the most valuable thing I do
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by angelbob 17y ago
Part of the challenge here is that you'd like to say to people, "people like you tried and liked X activity." So you'll need to collect a lot of data on what people tried and liked. More specifically, you probably need people to enter that
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by angelbob 17y ago
There's a great analysis of his suicide, I think in the book "The Moral Animal". It made a lot of sense, when viewed from his point of view. Eastman was an energetic, engaging and vivacious young man who had been brought low by a series of