kevinr

14 ms·

91.
by kevinr 11y ago
Why spend $12 at a bar for a cheeseburger when a Big Mac is $4 or ramen is $0.25 ?
92.
by kevinr 11y ago
Your ebook readers get a lot of hints from the ebook file about how to present the material---I am light on details, but I believe them to be significant. It's true that there's no human there checking the typeblocks for rivers a
93.
by kevinr 11y ago
I'm glad you're finding works you enjoy among the classics! I have a long fondness for Bradbury, Shelley, Conan Doyle, etc., but they didn't write, oh, Hal Duncan's VELLUM, or Christopher Barzak's THE LOVE WE SHARE
94.
by kevinr 11y ago
Oh hey, someone better-informed than me. There's also a sizeable fraction of the reading public of all ages who still prefer print books for a host of reasons both sentimental and practical. (The one I've just discovered: I can&#
95.
by kevinr 11y ago
This is weird because there's great variety between books and publishers, and there are lots of hidden costs. The one most self-publishers miss is marketing and sales---at the big publishers, there are I am not a publishing industry i
96.
by kevinr 11y ago
Or to try to convince readers to value books more.
97.
by kevinr 11y ago
Fair enough.
98.
by kevinr 11y ago
As an engineer, I promise you, I give not one single solitary conscious fuck about the uniqueness of solutions to differential equations. Mostly I just hit things with Fourier or Laplace transforms as appropriate until they stop moving.
99.
by kevinr 11y ago
> The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty publis
100.
by kevinr 11y ago
Actually, most of my experience is from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Genre buyers are willing to tolerate sub-par production---and let's be honest, the pulp paperbacks of yesteryear were not exactly going to give Edward T
101.
by kevinr 11y ago
Leaving aside the secondary markets for a moment---which yes, I agree with you on---do you feel ripped off buying video games online? They are, after all, just really large files.
102.
by kevinr 11y ago
Speaking as an occasional author, by the time I've finished the however-many drafts and several rounds of edits, I'm completely blind to the manuscript's mechanical flaws, and need someone else to point out to me the Spooneri
103.
by kevinr 11y ago
Also that's often comparing the discounted price of a print edition to the full price of the ebook. Print books being still sold under the old wholesale model, Amazon can still discount them, whereas ebooks being sold under the new mo
104.
by kevinr 11y ago
I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are: * Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a b
105.
by kevinr 11y ago
Amazon have a huge pile of different publishing imprints, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing And that's just original imprints; it doesn't list things like Audible, which Amazon owns, and wh
106.
by kevinr 11y ago
Glad to hear you folks are looking at scaling. I love the idea, and for small stuff the app so far is great. My book with around 2500 rows and 20 columns I find to be significantly slower than I prefer, though. Unclear how much of that i
107.
by kevinr 11y ago
Have you considered a career in information/computer security? I have some of the same tendencies, and infosec has given me all the entertainment I can handle and then some. (There are other fields adjacent to software engineering whic
108.
by kevinr 11y ago
It was code in my program.
109.
by kevinr 11y ago
Oh, or this investigation into programming language syntax for learnability! > Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax bar
110.
by kevinr 11y ago
> because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code. It seems to me that what Pike is getting at here is how easy it is to build mental models of the
111.
by kevinr 11y ago
> He made the claim that more features hurt readability (~6:10), because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code. To make that kind of claim without
112.
by kevinr 11y ago
I think the politest description I can provide of the experience of tracking down GC bugs is that they interacted with other features in complicated and error prone ways.
113.
by kevinr 11y ago
While I like James Reason's book and I find its discussion of mental models instructive in my code and in my life, I do have to break with him on his conclusions, which chiefly amount to the takeaway that systems at the level of comple
114.
by kevinr 11y ago
Given how common the experiences OP describes are among tech people of my acquaintance in the US, I have a hard time believing that anyone here saying "I know hundreds of recruiters and none of them think like this" isn't a r
115.
by kevinr 11y ago
Zulip can be hosted internally, and there is a desktop Linux client in addition to running fine in the usual zoo of Linux web browsers.
116.
by kevinr 11y ago
There is a Linux desktop client, although it isn't mentioned on the front page with the other clients. From https://zulip.org/clients.html : > There's a Linux client, but we don't have binaries posted yet
117.
by kevinr 11y ago
We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conver
118.
by kevinr 11y ago
Just don't make the mistake I did of running with less than 4 GB and then having a flash crowd show up. You really want the RAM for acceptable performance with a reasonable number of concurrent users.
119.
by kevinr 11y ago
Another Midwesterner transplant to MA here -- colder in the winter is actually better for highways. Up and down around the freezing point all winter like Massachusetts does produces massive frost heave that Minnesota roads just don't
120.
by kevinr 12y ago
Article says: "Secondly, Virtual DNS masks the true origin IP addresses of the provider's nameservers behind CloudFlare’s IP addresses. Visitors and/or attackers only see CloudFlare’s IP addresses when requesting answers, kee

More ›