jblow

9 ms·

31.
by jblow 7y ago
The notion that it's about fixing bugs in one place is revisionist. It's not what people thought they were for when they were introduced.
32.
by jblow 7y ago
If this is true, then why does it take so many engineers to make web sites today? People keep claiming these things increase productivity, yet there seems to be very little evidence of productivity increase.
33.
by jblow 7y ago
Bad article, in part because of the incomplete title. It should be called "What happens when your career becomes your whole identity, when you don't like your job and think it's a waste of time". If this latter part is n
34.
by jblow 7y ago
Disagree on that last part. If more programmers understood cache coherency, maybe their programs would not run like a giant turd.
35.
by jblow 7y ago
If one of your country’s official slogans is “Death to OtherCountry”, and so OtherCountry keeps not liking you ... it’s not that weird?!?
36.
by jblow 7y ago
Are you including the construction energy and materials costs of fossil fuels and engines in your non-efficiency statement?
37.
by jblow 7y ago
I think it’s just, after you have designed enough things, you learn to think like a system and you know what a lot of the possibilities are before you play those specific corners of the system. That said, you can always be surprised, and it
38.
by jblow 7y ago
Since I am mentioned in the article I have a correction to make that I think is pretty important. The article says that I like to find ideas by “playtesting” then goes on to describe playtesting as a form of user testing. Whereas there is s
39.
by jblow 7y ago
It should be very obvious once you think about it that breaking code into more files, and procedures into subprocedures, is pushing complexity around rather than simplifying ... and it’s pushing the complexity from somewhere visible, into a
40.
by jblow 7y ago
Some of the points you raise are matters of style (I have files that are 10k lines long and think they are better that way; also I don't think unit tests are as useful as claimed), but yeah, when you have 600 files and 11MB of code to
41.
by jblow 7y ago
Most programming I do is exploratory as well. Sometimes it takes a couple of years of exploring to find the thing. Sometimes I have to rewrite pretty hefty subsystems 5-7 times before I know how they should really work. I find that this kin
42.
by jblow 7y ago
I have to disagree; this is very clearly too simplistic. There are many dimensions in which a language can be better or worse. Things like: * How debuggable is it? * Do most errors get caught at compile time, or do they require that code pa
43.
by jblow 7y ago
Also ... renewables are always going through cycles of high and low availability. Prices vary across these cycles. If you make your fuel only at the time during the day when there is the highest delta between supply and demand, then you pay
44.
by jblow 7y ago
China is capitalist.
45.
by jblow 7y ago
What happens when the older version does not understand the newer data?
46.
by jblow 7y ago
The Amiga 500 was pretty responsive, and its CPU power was epsilon compared to a Raspberry Pi or any modern embedded system. It's just that modern software is garbage. That's all.
47.
by jblow 7y ago
Why have we made our systems so complicated that it takes years of experience to run software on a computer?
48.
by jblow 7y ago
Because it’s the equivalent of a stationary space ship being shot by a projectile traveling at the speed of the original space ship. If that is any remotely relativistic speed, duct tape is not going to fix the problem, because your space s
49.
by jblow 7y ago
Are you claiming that construction today is fast? I don’t understand. Are you claiming that a contemporary construction project would be able to build the Hoover Dam? That was almost 100 years ago and a lot of things have changed...
50.
by jblow 7y ago
A 91% top marginal tax rate would be a net negative on taxes, because most of the rich people would leave the country. There's a fine art to setting the tax rate at a level that people dislike, but not strongly enough to do something a
51.
by jblow 7y ago
It's not supposed to help you execute anything; it's an advertisement.
52.
by jblow 7y ago
Have you seen the building?? The picture at the top of the article is a small portion of the back. The thing is freaking giant.
53.
by jblow 7y ago
“California stop” is already a reserved term that means something else (slowing down mostly, but not all the way, at a stop sign).
54.
by jblow 7y ago
Try running a company this way and we’ll see how long it lasts.
55.
by jblow 7y ago
This tradeoff obviously can’t be evaluated without considering quantities. What percentage of your bug load is reduced, at the cost of how much development time? That said, it’s not that simple. There are threshold effects (more than X amou
56.
by jblow 7y ago
This article is gross. Very one-sided, no attempt to paint an objective picture. If someone did this about a person, it’d be scummy, but about a company it’s okay? I am sure the company is messed up, but come on.
57.
by jblow 8y ago
> (where there is already network delay an order of magnitude larger than the scheduler would impart) Not the right way to think about it; the connection latency is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you need to play audio in sync with
58.
by jblow 8y ago
Hashing text is one of the easiest, most common uses of hashing. As for your first example “you may be relying on a 3rd party service that compares things”, has this ever happened in the history of the universe?
59.
by jblow 8y ago
Except yes it is, because all these software apps are built on prior “real technology” and would be impossible without it. The flow of capital just doesn’t reflect that (and it’s not clear it should).
60.
by jblow 8y ago
If you can quickly iterate with a component system, you can iterate even faster just with regular procedures. Component systems aren’t magic (in fact they introduce friction).

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