mechanical_fish

1211 ms·

3661.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Well, someone has already poked a hole in the "satellite images" idea -- not updated enough. OTOH, let me attempt to rescue your excellent idea with this suggestion: cameras mounted on nearby buildings? Cameras are getting really cheap!
3662.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Let us all pray for Zed's sake that his mighty cynicism was strong enough to convince him to sell his Bear Stearns stock as soon as he got it. Apparently Bear Stearns employees were partially paid in stock, and a third of the outstanding sh
3663.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Might work as an iPhone or mobile app. Not as an app for standard browsers -- the data are too time-sensitive, and I don't have the coordination to juggle a laptop while driving a car. What I'd really kill for is a version of this app that
3664.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
None of the above. The whole thing is a big logo train wreck. Because the contrast of the stripey letters is so much lower, the whole thing ends up half-legible. At first glance I see "p ay st", or "myp ay st". I have to squint, or use my b
3665.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Yeah, this is just one of the worst pieces of writing in the history of P.R. -- if it had been phrased properly nobody would have even noticed. If Steve Jobs had composed the memo people would be grateful to have gotten it. Given that the
3666.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Mensa has always been the canonical example of a Groucho Marx punchline: A club that I don't want to belong to, because it would accept me as a member. This looks like more of the same. I'm not interested in pretending that the ability to s
3667.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
My sentiments exactly. As a Python outsider (Ruby won the coin flip, so I still haven't learned much Python) can I ask for a translation from the Python wizards in the audience? Is this a Zed-Shaw-style rant with 80% fewer swear words? i.e
3668.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
The line between an ex-programmer and a programmer is pretty fluid. Just open your resume in a text editor, delete the first three characters in "ex-programmer", and your doom will be averted! Even better, open a file in your text editor an
3669.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
I'm pretty sure that sole proprietors can write off business expenses as well. Of course, depending on what you try to write off, the IRS might be very suspicious -- but that's true for corps, too. The rules about what constitutes a "busine
3670.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
If you're just prototyping something for yourself I'm not sure it matters. The major reasons to be a corporation are: * You have assets that you want to shield from liability when your customers sue you -- you'd rather have them sue the cor
3671.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
That's why not all duplicate submissions are bad. Sometimes Submission A is what drives people to seek out and post New and Improved Submission B. Of course, if news stories would link to the freakin' primary sources , already, instead of
3672.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
My first thought on seeing this headline: "Oh, this is going to be about why Applescript totally sucks." And, sure enough, there's Applescript halfway down the essay, as an example of a classic antipattern in DSL design: the "Oh, if I make
3673.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
The really lucky part was that he got to tell this story for decades afterwards. I figure that the only reason to be a test pilot is the pleasure of telling stories like this one.
3674.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Who has time for unit testing? We'll do that after we ship. Seriously, though, there's a lot of phase space in a typical SR-71 flight, and not a lot of time to explore it all. It's a lot easier to home in on the bug once you know it's there
3675.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Air density at high altitude is insufficient to resist a body's tumbling motions, and centrifugal forces high enough to cause physical injury could develop quickly. Holy crap. You can be spun to death. Let's not even ask how this fact
3676.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
I think this is just toy-example syndrome. In my experience the real-world example looks more like this: f(X) -> X1 = foo(X, "Blah blah blah", true, :definitely, :ack), X2 = fab(X1, X, sizeof(X), X-1, bar(X, "martini"), :wit
3677.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Worst. Brand name. Ever. "Javascript" was pretty bad, but at least it didn't make me think of a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
3678.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Arrogance is not about actions or statements but attitude. Yes, but whose attitude? That of the "arrogant" person, or that of the person who interprets a certain set of actions and statements as "arrogance"? The problem is that there's
3679.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
I thought about this for a minute. The problem is that, first of all, arrogance doesn't imply ignorance. Data is data: If you believe that an SDK is unnecessary, but the customer feedback data says otherwise, the smart thing to do is to cha
3680.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Yes. What this means, of course, is that anyone who exhibits even a shred of self-confidence will probably be accused, by someone somewhere, of being arrogant. The symptoms are largely the same. The difference is one of degree, and of resul
3681.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Well, I haven't exactly read the Stumbling on Happiness book -- and that really is something that I regret -- but one of the points that the author made in his TED talk is that the ability to "look back and feel content" depends very,
3682.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Um, yeah, if your metric for success is "I've read more articles than the other guy" or "I've published more papers than the other guy", obviously you'll benefit from... reading more articles and publishing more papers. Personally I don't g
3683.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Thanks, this is just the kind of comment I was fishing for! I was scared off by the claims that the OS X install was tricky. That and the fact that I don't use Firefox for anything but Firebug at the moment... I find Safari to be more stabl
3684.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Well, that's emacs for you. Everyone gravitates to different bits. Yes, backward-kill-word would be excellent. I have C-backspace bound to that in Emacs, but I also have a Kinesis keyboard, so C-backspace is just as easy to type as C-w.
3685.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Um, yeah, that's right. I was totally careful to comply strictly with Microsoft's recommended standards for nonstandard XHTML. Yep. I assure you that I certainly did not use any nonstandard hacks to get IE5 and IE6, the banes of my
3686.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
The closer the average textfield's behavior could be to that of emacs, the happier I would be. Mac OS X supports a decent batch of emacs-style keybindings -- C-a and C-e work, C-k and C-y work, the cursor-movement keys work. Give me C-s and
3687.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
I think this new fund is basically a stunt to get a lot of headlines in the business press. It's not a coincidence that KP is announcing this at the same press conference where Apple announces a bunch of business-friendly iPhone features.
3688.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Again with the Wil Shipley: "Don’t announce until it can be downloaded. Don’t let it be downloaded until it can be bought." His argument is actually a bit more subtle than that, and since you're in a similar position I'd recommend listening
3689.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Given that the more established alternative is incentivize , which is at least 50% more awful, I welcome this newly abbreviated word.
3690.
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Wow, this announcement reads like a word-for-word rendition of a feature suggestion I made two weeks ago! It's almost as if the Heroku developers are reading this site and implementing user requests at lightning speed! Many, many thanks. I'

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