ljw1001

25 ms·

301.
by ljw1001 8y ago
Only doing interesting work in my spare time outside the office :(
302.
by ljw1001 8y ago
> complex things are just that: complex, and modeling them is at least as complex, so it will always be hard, I recall reading that a measure of the complexity of a thing (formally) is the shortest possible non-lossy description. This su
303.
by ljw1001 8y ago
"Many" doesn't mean "the majority" any more than it means "every".
304.
by ljw1001 8y ago
> it would be easier if the languages all used a common naming convention for things like .upper() etc. It would be easier if everyone would just speak English all the time, but I'm not sure it would be better.
305.
by ljw1001 8y ago
This is exactly right. It was meant for people with (a) a high school education to (b) fix problems in a repetitive manufacturing process where if you don't fix the problem on this car, it will appear again on the next car, and the one
306.
I HAZ A PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE ITZ LOLCODE (2007)(github.com)
1 points by ljw1001 8y ago|0 comments
307.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Sorry, but no. You don't deliver 'the wrong thing' because you're not interrupted constantly. One status check per day is enough to insure that. All the urgent communication that can't wait a day is ego-driven not
308.
by ljw1001 9y ago
It's hard to see how email would not be worse, since anything you 'post' could be forwarded without your knowledge to anyone with an email account. You would have to solve that one first.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I often disagreed with Paul (especially on politics), but he's an exceptionally gifted writer. I hope he finds time to continue for many years.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I was so happy to see the "mothership" in the first room of the music section in the amazing Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. Make my funk the P-Funk!
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by ljw1001 9y ago
If only. Many companies hiring this way are Paul Graham's "mosquitos" whose role in the tech ecosystem is to have a one in 10 (or 100) chance of making it big, and are largely running on a cocktail of delusions and hype.
312.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Actually, I suspect Google makes up for it on acquisitions. When I was there that's how most people got into the company.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
>For some reason that company insisted on only doing interviews at 7:00 AM, and my brain doesn't come fully online until after 9:00 anyway. Reminds me of my final round at Amazon, which they always do in Seattle. I woke before 4 AM
314.
by ljw1001 9y ago
I recall one of my friends, when I was at Google, sending me a screenshot of code written by Jeff Dean with an obvious bug. Jeff is, of course, extraordinary, but I wonder how many companies might have passed on him if he submitted that cod
315.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Umm. Not if they only stay 2 years at your company. I think that's about average outside of ones with golden handcuffs.
316.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Really hard puzzles that you had to submit a solution to if you wanted an interview. This was very rare in those days. The problems were original and clever, not pulled from a book or website. Also, the company was in Cambridge, MA and had
317.
by ljw1001 9y ago
When I was at one company (later acquired by Google), one of the developers created a model to show just how unlikely it was that every new hire would continue to raise the average level of competence for the team as a whole (as our hiring
318.
by ljw1001 9y ago
exactly. If the job and the pay were exceptional, sure. But today it's standard practice for average companies. One company I interviewed with gave me a program that had to be written in Scala, with the full knowledge that I would have
319.
by ljw1001 9y ago
I've worked at a company that generally hired extremely good engineers - much better than average and they were very successful because (1) doing that was actually important to the very hard problems they were solving, and (2) every ot
320.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Thanks for posting this. Very interesting. Smalltalk actually had some array-language like elements (Alan Kay knew a good idea when he saw one), but this takes it another level.
321.
by ljw1001 9y ago
Apple has been living on their reputation for design for years now, rather than actually producing good designs. The #$&@^ headphone adaptors I constantly attach when I want to use my iPhone and detach when I want to use my MacBook Pro
322.
by ljw1001 9y ago
I worked for one company where, as soon as the old earned time-off balances were wiped away, management of the biggest engineering group started telling people they couldn't take more than 4 weeks off. Sure, it was 3 weeks before the c
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by ljw1001 9y ago
That whole distinction between "IT" and "the business" makes me nuts. No one refers to marketing, sales, finance, production, etc., a thing separate from "the business" yet IT is just as fundamental to many bus
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I haven’t looked in a while but I don’t believe there was a way to get notified on a mention. With a small community that would be key
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I might go with discourse but I can’t afford the saas version ($100/mo) and was hoping to avoid having another thing to maintain.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I think some people don’t feel like it’s appropriate for asking questions. Also, you end up with a ton of open issues if you want the topics to be easy to find
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I'm sure VA and VW are out of date today, but when I used them, did not break all the time. The libraries worked together. I'm sorry to say that has not been my experience with Pharo.
328.
by ljw1001 9y ago
I don't understand the hostility to this application. Progress comes from trying different ways to do things. I tried this program a few years back, and thought it was ok. It is easier to use than JMP, which some others have mentioned,
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Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
57 points by ljw1001 9y ago|66 comments
330.
by ljw1001 9y ago
I've used Pharo, and, way back, programmed professionally in Cincom (then ParkPlace), IBM VisualAge, and whatever the Windows version of Smalltalk was called was called (Visual Smalltalk?). Also tooled-around a bit in Squeak. All three

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