rwallace

87 ms·

781.
by rwallace 11y ago
Everything I've heard about the lives of doctors and lawyers says that by and large (discounting the handful of percent of outliers) those professions make living on welfare or working at McDonald's for minimum wage look like bril
782.
by rwallace 11y ago
Agreed with most of the above, with the caveat that I actually like JavaScript. Sure, I have grumbled about JavaScript more than about various niche languages that are in some ways more mathematically elegant, but that's for the same r
783.
by rwallace 11y ago
That's because reality mixes them. If it was just a case of professional sports ruining a few hundred lives for entertainment like in the decadent years of the Roman Empire, well that would be bad but on the basis of sheer numbers it w
784.
by rwallace 11y ago
Okay, to clarify: The purpose of sport for the companies that make money from it is, well, making money, and that's from advertising, gambling and entertainment, as you say. But society grants sport a lot of tolerance and even encourag
785.
by rwallace 11y ago
I would suggest a footballer needing surgery is "too far". The purpose of sports is to provide a framework that motivates healthy exercise. Once it gets to the point where it's frequently causing harm rather than benefit to t
786.
by rwallace 11y ago
> guarantees that the visual and logical code hierarchies match; The fact that they might not is a constant cognitive load in curly brace languages (and a source of bugs if you ignore it). Well it's a cognitive load if you deal with
787.
by rwallace 11y ago
Captive audiences create bad incentives. As soon as the users don't have a choice, the supplier no longer has an incentive to maintain quality.
788.
by rwallace 11y ago
Phrased that way, it sounds more like kicking people while they're down than constructive critique. Maybe a more constructive way of putting it might be to discuss the appropriate lessons to learn from each case?
789.
by rwallace 11y ago
The problem with all the talk about 'effective charity' is that it invariably focuses on magnitude while ignoring sign. The great thing about donating to local soup kitchens as opposed to interfering in other people's countri
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by rwallace 11y ago
No, there is a very big ethical difference. The company that outsources to India isn't telling any lies about what it's doing. The company that replaces domestic workers with H1B immigrants - using a law whose stated purpose was t
791.
by rwallace 11y ago
If what you care about is games for their own sake, that's as valid a perspective as any other. My perspective is very different, because I care about games not for their own sake, but for their spin-off benefits: chips whose R&D w
792.
by rwallace 11y ago
My first reaction was 'huh? Why would I care if Sally is also viewing this page?' Looking at what it says on your website, it's clearer: what you really care about is if Sally is also editing , not viewing. That does solve a
793.
by rwallace 11y ago
Sounded quite straightforward to me. How else would you have preferred him to phrase it?
794.
by rwallace 11y ago
You do need to omit whitespace between the name and the opening parenthesis when defining a functionlike macro, but it doesn't matter when you're calling it.
795.
by rwallace 11y ago
I thought about that regarding semicolons, optional braces, newline placement, consistent placing of whitespace in general; then I decided having the machine tell me where I need to do more work is all very well and good, but what I really
796.
by rwallace 11y ago
Beware of assuming that every law passed with the intent of protecting workers actually has that effect. Yes, some laws really do protect workers (e.g. banning noncompete employment clauses). But laws that make it very difficult to get rid
797.
by rwallace 11y ago
> prefer static typing That's all very well, until you look at a few Java programs in the million line range, and it turns out the source code for most of them also includes a million lines of XML, and the reason for that is Java&#x
798.
by rwallace 11y ago
You're missing the point. He has no authority to take care of this now. Continuing to nag the boss after he's already been told 'no' in no uncertain terms not only won't make the company more successful, it will mak
799.
by rwallace 11y ago
Many deserts are within convenient pipeline range of the sea. Including Israel and California, the deserts being discussed here.
800.
by rwallace 11y ago
A rule in life: ruthlessly stomp on the maladaptive tendency of our brains to try to expand the scope of our responsibilities beyond the scope of our power. If you were the boss of this company, it would be your job to do something about an
801.
by rwallace 11y ago
In a desert with plentiful sunshine for an application where you don't need to worry about distribution and storage, I would expect solar to be quite competitive with even the notional price of fossil fuel. When you compare it with the
802.
by rwallace 11y ago
Drafting table style software engineering tools have been around for decades. It turns out that the only ones programmers actually want to use are the ones that deal with something that is actually visual/geometric, i.e. the layout of
803.
by rwallace 11y ago
This idea that open plan offices are about saving money needs to go in the bit bucket. If it was really about money, they'd have people working from home, which offers far greater cost savings. It's not about money, it's abou
804.
by rwallace 11y ago
My (also non-expert) understanding of current serious thought about black holes is that the event horizon is conjectured to be arbitrarily hot in the frame of reference of an observer hovering arbitrarily close to it. In the frame of refere
805.
by rwallace 11y ago
I solve that problem by programming in a proportional font, which removes the temptation. (I know some people program in a monospaced font for various reasons, but in my opinion, anything that needs a monospaced font is a bad idea in the lo
806.
by rwallace 11y ago
The theory that remote working is advantageous has the unstated premise that the thing being optimized for is wealth. In that theory, it makes sense to use methods that let people get their jobs done with minimum cost and distraction. In re
807.
by rwallace 11y ago
I think it's important to understand that such remarks, while grammatically in the second person, are not really addressed to the OP (who as he says, has learned from his experiences). They're really addressed to all the other peo
808.
by rwallace 11y ago
Actually the article had a great deal of substance, but it should be obvious that you're going to miss it if you stop after one paragraph.
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by rwallace 11y ago
To make definite claims about what will happen with cryonics patients, the Singularity etc is certainly a religious act. However, there is a distinction worth drawing between those and more moderate claims. I think the best argument for cry
810.
by rwallace 11y ago
Linux packagers seem to have successfully solved this problem. I imagine it's at least in part because it makes sense for them to put in a bit more effort (e.g. email to the author to make sure they have the right version, if necessary

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