dbecker

33 ms·

361.
by dbecker 14y ago
I think you are missing my point. Apple got the biggest market cap in the world by making products that are a joy to USE. A reviewers who writes about measurements from his caliper isn't describing UX at all. In fact, those measurements
362.
by dbecker 14y ago
I think it's a spectrum rather than a threshold. If one device was half as thick as another, you'd clearly notice that. But it's hard to believe there's going to be a major change in user experience with a half millimeter decrease in thick
363.
by dbecker 14y ago
I think reviewers overemphasize trivial differences in product dimensions just because those things are easy to measure. They talk about the Fire being thinner, as if a 0.6mm difference in thickness is going to make one tablet easier to hol
364.
by dbecker 14y ago
The complaints about R still seem counterintuitive to me. Python has the same data types listed above, and many more. A list in R is a list in Python. A data frame in R is a date frame in the pandas library. A matrix in R is a matrix in nu
365.
by dbecker 14y ago
>I found the syntax baffling, the documentation copious, but written for mathematicians instead of hackers I'm always surprised how much people hate the syntax of R. I primarily work in Python, but I use R once or twice a week... and t
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by dbecker 14y ago
With rpy2 you can even embed R code in Python.
367.
by dbecker 14y ago
Great question. I thought about it this afternoon, and I'm not sure what would cause me to change my mind about this... That seems like a red flag that I'm not being open minded enough about it. Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking qu
368.
by dbecker 14y ago
I think many people are confused about what "big data" means. I work for an analytics consulting company, and many of our clients want us to use Hadoop with their data. They've heard that Hadoop is the standard for big data, and they assoc
369.
by dbecker 14y ago
From an economic theory point of view, productivity increases generally increase the demand for labor. The suggestion that there is some level of "need" for labor suggests that there is a certain "need" for produced goods, and we happen to
370.
by dbecker 14y ago
People told the inventor of the steam shovel that he would cause massive unemployment because "one steam shovel replaces dozens of men with conventional shovels." He replied "Or thousands of men with teaspoons." I'm surprised how many peopl
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by dbecker 14y ago
And this is how a topical thread about startups gets derailed into unproductive political bickering.
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by dbecker 14y ago
I meant "what functionality is the remaining 5%." Not "what language is it." Basically, once you are 95% Go, what parts are hard to convert to Go to make it 100%
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by dbecker 14y ago
I've worked with dishonest people. "Everyone is bullshitting, so I have to too" was always their excuse. I disagree that the existence of liars "forces" others to do the same, and I think it's a really harmful way of thinking.
374.
by dbecker 14y ago
Maybe it's because I don't live in Silicon Valley... or because I'm less "into the startup scene" than other people on HN... but I'm surprised anyone even cares about the TechCrunch article. Shirley Hornstein is a nobody to me. She fooled
375.
by dbecker 14y ago
This is a really awkward sentence: "100% of our production system is now running Go as 95% of our application." I'm curious what the 5% is that they didn't convert to go.
376.
by dbecker 14y ago
It's a shame there isn't an about page that suggests what will be different (or better) about lobste.rs from HN. If it's just a clone site where a different set of people post the same articles and similar comments, I won't waste my time.
377.
by dbecker 14y ago
I'm really impressed with how responsive you've been with comments on this page (and by quickly you are incorporating feedback). I think that's a great sign, and I hope the app really takes off!
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by dbecker 14y ago
>Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't >understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, >are these so much better than a $500 one? They are better. They aren't 5x better (as if this
379.
by dbecker 14y ago
The web page could be much more reader friendly (and less about you). Specifically, the reader shouldn't have to search around the page to get a clear picture of what the app does. The top section of text (The Mission) does very little to
380.
by dbecker 14y ago
The problem you are describing isn't a problem with relative dates. It is simply imprecision. You can make relative dates that are precise (e.g. 783 days and 4 hours ago), and you can make absolute dates that are imprecise (e.g. 2010).
381.
by dbecker 14y ago
Though a scatterplot conveys less information (e.g. the correlations between the two axes), I think it takes longer to process. It also takes more screen real estate than a pair of histograms.
382.
by dbecker 14y ago
Agreed. I've read a few different programming books, and this was the one that did the most to improve my programming. The material isn't incredibly advanced, so some expert programmers will get less out of it. But I think it's very worth
383.
by dbecker 14y ago
There are plenty of ways of accurately representing reality that don't rely on mutable state. F=MA is a function, and it isn't mutable. I could calculate force from some other function (e.g. Gm1m2/r^2). I can compose those functions toget
384.
by dbecker 14y ago
I agree that some people will keep cable for sports, but cable has been losing about 1 million households a year recently ( http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/04/over-1-million-u-s-cable-subsc... ). That's driven mostly by internet access, and fas
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by dbecker 14y ago
I don't think the relationship between a language's model of computation and the physical computing mechanism is particularly important. It's more important for a language to follow our MENTAL model of computing. Fortunately, the mental m
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by dbecker 14y ago
It's $70/month for internet and $120/month for internet+TV. People already moving away from paying $50/month for TV, and the TV connection will be even less valuable once you have a gigabit internet connection.
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by dbecker 14y ago
I read both the "manifesto" and the docs. Still not sure exactly how they are improving testing. As far as I can tell, it's just running tests on their machines instead of mine. It integrates with GitHub, and they've done something-or-othe
388.
by dbecker 14y ago
Employers are cautious, in part, because working with bad programmers sucks. Their bugs slow down the whole project... and good programmers resent working with someone who doesn't pull their weight. In many cases, it's better to let a posit
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by dbecker 14y ago
If you've ever worked with classmates on a program, you probably already have a sense of what it means to be a good programmer. As you become more advanced and experienced, the differences between good programmers and bad programmers will
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by dbecker 14y ago
I hope it's easy to find a list of MegaKey advertisers, so I know not to buy anything from any of them.

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