ken

63 ms·

571.
by ken 7y ago
Does providing feedback make this effect worse, or better? How do we know? N=1 isn't exactly a significant sample size. It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of law
572.
by ken 7y ago
No, that's just another public rationale. Programmer salaries are much more expensive than even private offices. In a past life, when I wrote software for a living, I would ask my managers how much it cost, so I could pay out of pocke
573.
by ken 7y ago
Regarding the pronunciation questions at the top: the organization seriously needs to stop the cutesy “PostgreSQL” spelling. It’s been SQL for 20 years and everybody knows it. Great job on switching to a query language that everybody (in th
574.
by ken 7y ago
I was just on a job which was initially scheduled to include painting. The SDS for the primer was 17 pages long. We had to fit and train on respirators. We had to develop methods to keep the paint from spilling while transported around our
575.
by ken 7y ago
I have a Wacom tablet. The drivers don’t install on macOS any more. There doesn’t seem to be any technical reason for this. It’s a USB device (“essentially a mouse”) and it worked fine for several major versions. Maybe it was a 32/64
576.
by ken 7y ago
I take logging in the general sense to mean “print”, which is pretty easy. I’ve used lots of languages without usable (visual) debuggers. I was probably programming for 10 years before I saw a debugger that didn’t crash the OS half the time
577.
by ken 7y ago
"Open source" has a couple different related meanings, and it's not clear exactly which aspect you mean, or how it would help here. - A license which allows the source code to be redistributed under the same terms as it was r
578.
by ken 7y ago
For counting pieces of paper, machines sound like a good fit. Any capabilities beyond the literal needs (i.e., counting) sound like an invitation for mistakes and corruption. Your phone has 100,000 times as much memory as the Apollo Gui
579.
by ken 7y ago
I stopped putting months on my resume. Nobody cares what month you joined or left. A gap of less than 2 years won't even be noticed. "Job X, 2000-2003; Job Y, 2004-2008." I guarantee no interviewer is ever going to say &qu
580.
by ken 7y ago
Only if they've found a way to consistently defeat Brooks's Law -- and if they have, there are much more efficient ways to exploit it than counting on free labor of uncertain quality.
581.
by ken 7y ago
What does it mean, though? Is it just "sour grapes is a powerful force"? I don't know about gaps in particular but there are lots of places I thought I'd love working that wouldn't take me.
582.
by ken 7y ago
The quality of debuggers varies hugely, especially since different languages support different debugging features (e.g., conditions vs exceptions vs neither). Logging works pretty much the same everywhere.
583.
by ken 7y ago
From what I’ve seen, Windows APIs are in C++, and Swift doesn’t really offer any C++ interop. You’d have to wrap everything in C functions first. Plus, Windows isn’t an officially supported platform for the Swift compiler. I wouldn’t hold
584.
by ken 7y ago
Apple has never mentioned any SDK for programming the FPGA, AFAIK. Source?
585.
by ken 7y ago
According to Rosetta Code [1], “Standard Pascal does not allow variadic functions” — though specific implementations have proprietary extensions which allow this. [1]: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Variadic_function#Pasc
586.
by ken 7y ago
I think the point is that it’s not so rare that one might run into this type of situation. The article even mentions one. > It is unfortunate that there is no way to make this convenience available to routines in general.
587.
by ken 7y ago
I’m pretty sure the Ragnar Relay uses ham radio volunteers to call in finishers. I don’t know if there’s any technical reason for it.
588.
by ken 7y ago
In many cases, a great engineering team can practically manage themselves. I've been on teams that had managers who were so bad they were useless at best, but so much engineering experience that we could ship a good product anyway. I
589.
by ken 7y ago
I've been programming for over 20 years, and I can't say I've ever regretted being too DRY. I'll take abstraction any day.
590.
by ken 7y ago
In the "abstract art" sense, isn't most music "abstract"? Does a Brahms symphony (or Knopfler solo) attempt to reference natural sounds? "Abstract music" is actually an existing term [1], and it simply me
591.
by ken 7y ago
They're thoughts. That is their form. To use a software analogy, thoughts are the model . English words are one possible serialization . (Other possible serializations include other phrasings of English words, Japanese words, mat
592.
by ken 7y ago
> When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had "labs" at home, and we would do various "experiments." One time, we were discussing something -- we must have been 11 or 1
593.
by ken 7y ago
> He uses files to do it as well! Opening an Excel spreadsheet. I find it interesting that your first example of a file-centric (rather than app-centric) workflow describes the file by the application that creates/views/edits i
594.
by ken 7y ago
Just because a company has a financial interest in learning a piece of information doesn't make it legal to acquire that information in any possible way. Pasting a signature onto a different document sounds like a clear cut case of fr
595.
by ken 7y ago
For all intents and purposes, Knuth has. He's certainly more careful than most but I don't think he's unique among all of humanity here.
596.
by ken 7y ago
As someone who used a real NeXT machine, I could never figure out the appeal of window managers like WindowMaker. It's like those Aqua 'themes' for Windows XP. It's superficially similar (more or less) but it's mi
597.
by ken 7y ago
I had to open system Help to try to figure out how to log out of Windows NT 4 the first time I used it. We didn’t even have Google. Helpfully, choosing Help crashed the system, which accomplished my goal.
598.
by ken 7y ago
> That said, in a real surgical team some of members make considerably more money than the others Is that not already the case with software development teams?
599.
by ken 7y ago
So, like a "surgical team"? Fred Brooks proposed that 45 years ago, and I still don't see any evidence that anyone is moving in that direction. Everyone I know says that all programmers and managers need to read TMMM , but
600.
by ken 7y ago
I’ve mostly given up, since web developers seem to have forgotten that URIs should be stable. If there’s a 50% chance it’ll be gone when I go to look for it, it’s not worth the effort to me. This is like reason #17 why I wish we had a hyper

More ›