samd

8 ms·

31.
by samd 14y ago
It's interesting to contrast that with the way Valve was run, given Half-Life was a contemporary of Daikatana, but obviously did much better.
32.
by samd 14y ago
Istanbul's layout is downright Byzantine.
33.
by samd 14y ago
"Modern HTML5/JS apps depend on beautiful, consistent RESTful JSON APIs." "Rails is great for JSON APIs." "Many of these companies have client-heavy HTML5/JS applications which consume a JSON API coming out of Rails. Many of them have
34.
by samd 14y ago
In Valve's New Employee Handbook released a few months ago there was a quip about how Valve struggled to hire disciplines well outside of its typical expertise. They specifically mentioned industrial designers as one of those disciplines. I
35.
by samd 14y ago
Integration tests just mean you are testing the integration of multiple components, say view and controller, model and database, controller and model. Acceptance tests are tests from the end-user's perspective and touch the entire stack lik
36.
by samd 14y ago
You think typing skills are as essential to being a productive, and by productive I mean creating wealth and value, not lines of code, a productive developer as dribbling is to being a good basketball player?
37.
by samd 14y ago
I don't understand programmer's obsession with typing efficiency. We're not typists. Typing is a tiny fraction of the time I spend programming. Most of the time I'm thinking, or talking to another developer about a problem. I could have the
38.
by samd 14y ago
And I'd upvote it to Mars. FactoryGirl is completely an anti-pattern, unless maybe you're doing acceptance testing, but you know even then I wouldn't want FactoryGirl in my codebase, people would be too damn tempted to use it everywhere.
39.
by samd 14y ago
Yeah, should've known the article would grossly misrepresent the claims of the scientists.
40.
by samd 14y ago
This article is as absurd as if it had said: "It's official, scientists have discovered the meaning of life!" The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, but that they can prove that
41.
by samd 14y ago
Good riddance. There is nothing essential to the role managers fill that couldn't be done by someone without authority over you. That doesn't necessarily mean removing all managers, it just means not making them your boss. Valve is proof th
42.
by samd 14y ago
Testing isn't just about preventing bugs, it also encourages better design, and good design makes extending and enhancing your application much easier and faster. ...in general, of course, there's always exceptions, don't be dogmatic.
43.
by samd 15y ago
You weren't the only one who found it awkward and uncomfortable. The bit about sex set the tone for the rest of the piece. The operator calling her 'honey' certainly didn't help. Even so the piece was powerful. I empathized with Kara and it
44.
by samd 15y ago
Rails never used PUT correctly to begin with. Everybody uses update_attributes which does partial updates. Ideally you wouldn't need to do partial updates and just send the entire resource; your resources shouldn't be so big that that's an
45.
by samd 15y ago
The Agile mantra these days is write code instead of talking, but there's no faster way to iterate than to have a conversation. Sure you've got to write code at some point, but save yourself wasted hours and days doing the wrong thing and t
46.
by samd 15y ago
So touch screen only controls aren't the way to go. But it may not be necessary to reinvent the basic controls of the car. Making a better climate control system isn't going to win hearts and minds. But what would be very interesting is a w
47.
by samd 15y ago
I know it's not the important thing in the entire automotive industry. But I think it just might be to the average driver. Assuming, of course, you've got the mechanics right. Like a hierarchy of needs, having a reliable car to go from poi
48.
by samd 15y ago
Does anyone else get the feeling that the entire automotive industry could be disrupted by a company that focused on design, usability, and modern technology in their car interiors? It seems to me you could replace just about every car's da
49.
by samd 15y ago
Just about all of these problems can be solved with good agile practices like pairing and scrum. People are way more productive, focused, and determined when pairing. It's simply much harder to waste time and produce low quality work when y
50.
by samd 15y ago
How does an empire conquer that first city? Do they too start as movements until they've dominated one area?
51.
Unix Systems Programming in Ruby(librelist.com)
5 points by samd 15y ago|0 comments
52.
by samd 15y ago
Twitter and Facebook give businesses the opportunity to interact with their customers. Using those channels as yet another way to talk at customers is wasting that opportunity. The best way for local businesses to use Twitter is to actu
53.
by samd 15y ago
Have a source for that information? Facebook's own API documentation page says: "There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of permissions your site requests and the number of users that will allow those permissions. The great
54.
Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz Debate the Tech Bubble(economist.com)
20 points by samd 15y ago|2 comments
55.
by samd 16y ago
I recently did a Startup Weekend and coded basically non-stop for a couple days. Afterwards I felt great, like my skills were being used to their fullest; and I had created something significant. It wasn't until days later that burn-out set
56.
by samd 16y ago
I don't suppose you'll tell us how you know whether a site's content is original or not. What if you have a blog with lots of quotes from other sites; will that hurt your rankings because Google sees "unoriginal" content? Is there some rati
57.
by samd 16y ago
Let's go with: nobody's a Cartesian dualist.
58.
by samd 16y ago
I'm sure there are still some out there, but I haven't run into any. Most philosophers I know are compatibalists. Though to be fair predictable is not the same thing as determined, and we mostly think that determinism is false. However, I t
59.
by samd 16y ago
Have any examples? I'm curious which philosophical problems have been solved by science. Edit: To be fair, I'll provide an example of what I mean. David Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" is about why we have qualitative experiences.
60.
by samd 16y ago
My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist. Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the scien

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