ken

56 ms·

511.
by ken 7y ago
Your percentages are backwards, IME. Timeouts and logging and such are definitely not “80% of use cases”. Interfacing with humans and human systems are.
512.
by ken 7y ago
Any ETL tool can do tasks like this. It probably has a terrible user interface, but they're enterprise tools and enterprise tools tend to be terrible, regardless of the style or task. You're right that most GUIs don't tend t
513.
by ken 7y ago
I think I live in the 1990's still. > we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes I've had friends' cars broken into this way in the recent past. Not for radios, perhap
514.
by ken 7y ago
Have you seen the price of rent recently? That's a nice dream but half the people I know can't afford to live within 25 miles of where they work. <$100 a month in gas will save >$750 a month in rent. The economics aren&#x
515.
by ken 7y ago
Just recognize that you're holding SQL to an unfair standard here. You wouldn't reject an HTTP framework because you can't paste raw HTTP into it. You wouldn't reject an IMAP framework because you can't paste raw
516.
by ken 7y ago
Our programming languages suck at providing useful types. "String" is a structural data type. "SQL query" and "HTML snippet" and "regular expression" and "user-entered text" are semantic ty
517.
by ken 7y ago
> I agree that the data should be treated anonymously and confidentially, with severe punishment to abuses. What constitutes "abuse"? Differential privacy is hard. Once the data has been collected, simply not being an expert
518.
by ken 7y ago
The US census was infamously used to assist in rounding up Americans of specific ethnic backgrounds for concentration camps. It would go a long way to easing people’s minds if they had some way to guarantee that this could not happen again.
519.
by ken 7y ago
There's many levels of pattern matching, and computers have to start at the bottom. First you have to convert the real world into a form you can use, like vision or voice recognition. Then you've got to parse that into concepts.
520.
by ken 7y ago
> For mathematicians, operators are essential to how they think. But programming is not math, just like it isn't text, or color, or datetimes, or any other type of value our programs deal with. Even in programs I've written wh
521.
by ken 7y ago
Just when I thought Lisp had been ransacked for every last feature that language designers were willing to steal, the "War on commas" pops up -- complete with discussion of the essential differences might exist between "(&quo
522.
by ken 7y ago
So? There’s lots of old standards that don’t fit well with modern programming languages, so we abandoned them, or only use the parts that still make sense.
523.
by ken 7y ago
Why is NaN even a concept in modern languages? We don’t have a special “not a string” that all string functions return when they have no useful value to return.
524.
by ken 7y ago
They say that, and then turn around and show an example using IEEE-754 Doubles. You've got two infinities and two "not a number" values. What your type system thinks is a number isn't even necessarily a number. Maybe.
525.
by ken 7y ago
> the SQLite 3.8.7 release, which was 50% faster than the previous release Nit: the link says it’s 10% faster than the previous release. It’s 50% faster than some arbitrary point in the past, perhaps the time when they began their CPU-ba
526.
by ken 7y ago
Great idea for some products, infeasible for others. I recently needed a Firewire cable, on a day's notice, and after much searching I concluded there's no longer any store in Seattle which sells computer components in person, es
527.
by ken 7y ago
Buildings certainly do change. I just finished 3 months of work on a structure that was "finished" 20 years ago. We had the client coming to us with changes to our changes several times a week. The problem with software is tha
528.
by ken 7y ago
Are you taking into account memory fragmentation? Or the internal malloc data structures? If your record were just 1 byte more, it could easily double the total actual memory usage. Memory usage is discrete, not continuous. It's not
529.
by ken 7y ago
Both of those 16x16 icons look like blurry messes to me. If they weren't sitting next to 6 other larger pictures of a tape recorder, drawn in the same style, there's no way I'd have any clue what it was.
530.
by ken 7y ago
It sounds like you're describing font hinting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting
531.
by ken 7y ago
That's a great analogy. For scaled outline fonts to remain legible at low resolutions, they have a sophisticated hinting system (it even has a little virtual machine!). I'm sure if someone developed a hinting VM framework for vec
532.
by ken 7y ago
Not in my experience (2 unions). Do you have any examples of unions where this has occurred? (Recently, not some event from the 1950's or 1960's -- racists and sexists were much more powerful in all forums back then.) Your exa
533.
by ken 7y ago
No, your salary depends on how well you negotiate, not how good a worker you are. Whenever I’ve shared salary information with coworkers (at non-union tech jobs) it never correlated with value or quality or productivity. If you really want
534.
by ken 7y ago
Sexist/racist people don’t show up to union meetings and volunteer for union committees to push sexist/racist policies. It’s not like national politics where it’s a prestigious and high paying job, and corporations are throwing a
535.
by ken 7y ago
It sounds like you're conflating two orthogonal concepts: multiple named clipboard locations, and multiple data types on one clipboard. Both already exist, and are how clipboards on major platforms have worked for decades. The Javascr
536.
by ken 7y ago
I'd go even further. Minimize the exposure time to parsers. We started my undergrad compilers class with several weeks on parsing. I think it's by far the hardest aspect in all of compilerdom -- and as a Lisp programmer, I didn&
537.
by ken 7y ago
I would say the hero worship and the "win the popularity lottery" model for software success are two of the attributes of the industry I like the least. Self funding for indie developers would be great but I don't see this he
538.
by ken 7y ago
Neither of you is wrong. There's two basic models that I see. Some people never cook, and only eat food from restaurants. They only use their kitchen as the place to store leftovers in the fridge and reheat them in the microwave. Th
539.
by ken 7y ago
You are fortunate that the problems with modern software shops happen to align with the types of problems you can deal with. For example, there aren't plenty of companies with quiet offices searching for developers. When I tell my m
540.
by ken 7y ago
> The author doesn’t say it’s the _only_ medium. No, but the author does say: "Completing these tasks is exceedingly difficult inside the confines of our heads. We need an external medium in which to perform this elaboration, and wr

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