jowiar

63 ms·

601.
by jowiar 15y ago
Think back to CW circa 1997. The internet is too complex to find the most relevant results by machine. These things must be hand-indexed. There is no better way to do it. All Google does is guess as to what the "most relevant" results are.
602.
by jowiar 15y ago
Two quick things jump out at me: (1) This is TDD, without the implementation part of it. (2) There have to be some halting problem issues in here. It's actual realm of usefulness is constrained somewhere, though I'm not exactly sure where
603.
by jowiar 15y ago
Generally I've had no issues getting meetings, at least with a staffer, of my congressperson. On a sidenote, does a group that focuses on gov't relations and PR exist that represents what would is largely the consensus HN community interest
604.
by jowiar 15y ago
The definition of equilibrium. Every child has 2 parents. Thus in each reproduction, every parent creates on average half a child (sounds rather morbid). Thus for the population to remain in equilibrium, each person needs to reproduce, on a
605.
by jowiar 15y ago
> But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable And we wonder why BigCo acquisitions of startups rarely pan out.
606.
by jowiar 15y ago
Amen. Sprinting works when you can see the finish line. Sprinting with no finish line in sight? Just stupid, and you're probably never going to make it to the finish line.
607.
by jowiar 15y ago
The overworking has nothing to do with changing the world - rather, it runs contrary to it. If perpetual overworking is necessary for a startup, it's not pushing anything revolutionary enough to be considered changing the world, as the over
608.
by jowiar 15y ago
>> And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Oh come on. God forbid you are ever forced to interact with another human. The bubbleization of "society" is a concept that we are bette
609.
by jowiar 15y ago
I second this thoroughly. I was was almost driven to start blogging last week by ASF's poor job of maintaining its projects. There was a small bug in Solr. I was not the first to find this bug, and someone had not only reported the bug, but
610.
by jowiar 15y ago
The thing about commuting by bike/transit in the Bay Area is that it is doable, largely because there is critical mass with regards to enough people doing it that the facilities exist. In many cities, you cannot bring a bike onto a rush hou
611.
by jowiar 15y ago
Further along these lines, modern communication has caused the US political system to more closely approach direct democracy, causing problems along the lines of those foreseen.
612.
by jowiar 15y ago
The issue also is that, while technical skills are often a checklist of things which can be acquired through various methods (lectures? books? websites?), much of the value of classes in liberal arts/humanities/etc. comes from the other stu
613.
by jowiar 15y ago
The broken process may not be company-specific. We are in an industry that is driven not just by getting things to market, but by getting things to market faster than the other guy. As we all know, software does not really scale too well to
614.
by jowiar 15y ago
There are pigeonhole principle issues with the concept of url shortening - the same that apply to data compression in general. With regards to urls that are a bit of ways down the tree ( http://www.foo.com/bar/baz/whatever ), this isn't rea
615.
by jowiar 15y ago
What was the state of "frameworks" in 2005, particularly in Java-land. Struts? Spring? Anything that didn't make you want to gouge your eyes out? Even outside of Java-land, Rails had yet to hit 1.0, and Django was just starting. The evoluti
616.
by jowiar 15y ago
How irrational.
617.
by jowiar 15y ago
I hate getting political on HN, but, more than anything else, at least in the USA, healthcare costs are a huge cause of this. That health coverage is tied to employment creates a fixed cost on employers per-employee, rather than a transferr
618.
by jowiar 15y ago
One of the textbook examples of groupthink, used in just about every classroom that covers the topic, is the Challenger explosion. If it's a problem for rocket scientists, nobody is immune.
619.
by jowiar 15y ago
Amen. Neal Stephenson develops excellent worlds, creates characters that draw emotion out of readers, and then the endings fizzle. Every single time.
620.
by jowiar 15y ago
"Good Programmers write Portable Code" seems a bit of a hasty generalization. Good programmers write portable code if portability is a goal of the project. Portability, as you define it, comes at a direct cost of maintainability, and potent
621.
by jowiar 15y ago
I was not implying the Ferragamos were the wrong choice. Rather, the Boss/Diesel/etc. "designer" stuff that is probably made in the exact same Chinese factory as the $50 equivalents. I was trying to say "get it cheap, or get it right" No
622.
by jowiar 15y ago
One of the keys in all of this is differentiating between "cheap crap", "cheap crap with a big price tag", and "expensive but worth it". I recently went shoe shopping. I was looking for a pair of comfortable, casual shoes. What I came acros
623.
by jowiar 15y ago
The crazy thing is that Pittsburgh should be an awesome place to start something. Cost of living there is next to nil, with burn rates hanging around half what they would be in the valley. There is good access to talent, as well. Eventually
624.
by jowiar 15y ago
The relevant element of FP is statelessness. That said, statelessness could easily be considered a leaky abstraction because, at some point, the machine you are working on has state. Your machine has CPU registers and memory and such, so th
625.
by jowiar 15y ago
One question: What is meaning? Making life longer? Making life better? Creating options? Creating experiences? I think everyone here can agree on the basic idea that some things have meaning and some do not. Reaching consensus on what speci
626.
by jowiar 15y ago
The same way you get it out of cus?
627.
by jowiar 16y ago
I think taking Joel's thoughts on lunch in isolation from his thoughts on workspace design is a mistake. In my experience, when my workspace has been more quiet/isolated, I've enjoyed lunch as an opportunity to get to know colleagues, wrap
628.
by jowiar 16y ago
A friend of mine writes http://www.hobbygamedev.com - Interesting articles about game development - some on a technical "this code accomplishes this task" level, and some on a more theoretical "what is a game" level