bkovitz

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31.
Ask HN: Context-switching
4 points by bkovitz 17y ago|8 comments
32.
by bkovitz 17y ago
Yeah, the GED is the way to go, if you want to get into college. That's how I did it. The GED is so retarded, you're pretty much guaranteed to score in the top percentiles. College are required to treat these high GED scores as equivalen
33.
by bkovitz 17y ago
> I've been having issues lately trying to motivate myself to do mundane, or at the very least "unappealing", work (namely, [high]school work). It's not that I'm lazy — actually I'm afraid I'm a workaholic sometimes — but that I always
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Someone tell me if this is right (it's just guesswork): Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition:
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by bkovitz 17y ago
That's not what I took from the article. A summary of this article will distort it terribly, but here's an attempt: 1. A person's entire life story contains ups, downs, and complexity, of a sort that can't be disentangled, and are unique t
36.
by bkovitz 17y ago
I feel your pain. Most articles on the Internet could use a summary to help the reader make a decision about whether they're worth reading. Most of them would also be a lot better if they just got to their point. And skipped the other st
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Berners-Lee's design for URLs, etc. is spectacularly elegant and carefully thought through. It's not a good example to illustrate the alleged superiority of "duct-tape programming". There are different kinds of design, useful in different
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by bkovitz 17y ago
FWIW, I've read that the reason for pushing interns beyond their physical limits is simply money, not teaching or building character. It's cheaper to work them ridiculous hours than to hire enough people to do the job well. Working sleep-d
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by bkovitz 17y ago
The debunking of the myth of unreadability omitted something of concern to me: How much Perl code "in the wild" uses those best practices? I have no doubt that Perl can be written in a disciplined and reasonable manner, readable to people
40.
by bkovitz 17y ago
That's a wonderful thing about Perl, but we're talking about readability here. To read Perl code in practice (written by people other than yourself), you need to know an extraordinary number of Perlisms. This is the curse of TMTOWTDI.
41.
by bkovitz 17y ago
But surely you're not saying, categorically, that software architecture is pointless? Not at all, only that Frank Gehry might be a poor analogy to enlighten people about the value of software architecture and design. "Duct tapers good" v
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by bkovitz 17y ago
What if the training and consulting he offers really benefits his clients?
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by bkovitz 17y ago
With considerable uncertainty because I haven't spent much time with his buildings (maybe there is an "aha!" moment waiting for me), yes. The motive appears to be, "How pointlessly weird can I get?" Part of the method seems to be, "Let's
44.
by bkovitz 17y ago
How is it not ad hominem ? It's telling facts about the speaker to put down the content. Regarding credentials, we are judging the content on its merits, not deferring to Uncle Bob's authority.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Point well taken: School is a time to learn things that the practical world won't pressure you to learn, and you will learn the practical stuff once you're hired. But. I have seen so many college graduates, who've spent four years taking c
46.
by bkovitz 17y ago
There is a subtle art to selecting the granularity of testing that takes a while to learn This is very true. The only way to learn TDD is to overdo it. You need at least one project (maybe on your own time) where you over-test and find
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by bkovitz 17y ago
I would deride Frank Gehry. I've only been to one of his buildings, but it struck me as gratuitously zany: a very expensive and confusing way to do what could have been done better with a good ol' roughly rectangular box. Many of those cla
48.
by bkovitz 17y ago
TDD is not a tool for preventing errors, although it has that effect. It's primarily a way to use the computer to help you design. It's an attention-helper. Here are two things you have to do when programming: start with a problem that is
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by bkovitz 17y ago
How could anyone upmod that? It's pure ad hominem.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Also, in the U.S., the poor wouldn't buy vegetables, they'd buy fast food. Maybe there's a "do-gooder" entrepreneurial opportunity: show poor people how much fun vegetables can be.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
The "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" principle and its corollaries are all true, but only trivially so. In fact, many good ideas and opportunities can be found simply by reversing what stupid people are doing (intelligent people, e
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by bkovitz 17y ago
When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and Cupertin
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Talk much more slowly than you think is reasonable. It will seem slow to you, but it will sound normal to the audience.
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Beautiful glass sculptures of deadly viruses and bacteria(boingboing.net)
4 points by bkovitz 17y ago|0 comments
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by bkovitz 17y ago
I would be satisfied with a good explanation of why the question is ill-formed, how the illusion comes about, etc. I really don't think the question is ill-formed, though. There is a big explanatory gap. Denying that is simply dishonest.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined"
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Good advice. Also, you can stay a 'child' as long as you like, even in college.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Here is a problem with the idea that you should stay in high school in order to learn how to socialize: How many geeks who finished high school learned how to socialize? Learning happens when you are ready and interested. The fact that you
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Getting advice is part of the skill of making decisions.
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by bkovitz 17y ago
Before the 20th century, with all its mass-scale standardizations, going to college when you were 14 or so was not so unusual, at least for people who liked academic subjects. The college curriculum is best absorbed when you have nothing e

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