smackay

60 ms·

541.
by smackay 16y ago
My take on that sentence was not that author was comparing functional with object-oriented but rather the available tools and other infrastructure necessary to manage teams of developers and deploy code.
542.
by smackay 16y ago
It is surprising that in 2010 we are still talking about efficiency in terms of lines of code whether the absolute number to express a problem or in the speed that these lines can be created. I realise that this is a proxy for the ability o
543.
by smackay 16y ago
I can see real value in re-submitting this if there are a series of submissions or comments that shows this is a current topic of interest but it would be a shame if HN became more like TV with endless repeats. Having said that I think clas
544.
by smackay 16y ago
I always found buzzwords to be both purposeful and innocuous at the same time. The effect seems to be to present the speaker as dynamic but at the same time not saying anything too controversial or that can easily be refuted in normal conve
545.
by smackay 16y ago
There was also an attempt by Lego to trademark the blocks. That would have prevented competitors from creating compatible designs. However this was recently struck down by the European Court, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/
546.
by smackay 16y ago
The article seems oriented towards services related companies that supply warm bodies to big companies - hardly surprising given the target audience of Computerworld. What is rather surprising is that it seems to take everybody who makes a
547.
by smackay 16y ago
Public demonstrations in Europe these days are generally well-behaved. Probably the main motivation for taking to the streets is to ensure that the government at least acknowledges an issue rather than simply ignoring as was case in the pas
548.
by smackay 16y ago
Bar-tailed godwits can do a crossing of the Pacific Ocean - Alaska to New Zealand - 10000km in 8 days non-stop. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2664343/ has all the details.
549.
by smackay 16y ago
I think this approach has some rather nice features: 1. There is no need to try and break a task down into smaller steps before entering it into the list. When you come to work on it you probably have had a chance to think about it some mor
550.
by smackay 16y ago
With money to burn you could certainly make great strides in improving software in many areas of the sciences. A lot of tools used daily in areas of biology for example are very capable but were typically designed for use by the original au
551.
by smackay 16y ago
Having something to show is the obvious solution to that. Even the simplest app hosted somewhere cheap demonstrates a myriad of skills that speak volumes about your capabilities. You still have to dodge the person ticking the bullet points
552.
by smackay 16y ago
The article mentions the lingering fear of Smalltalk images but virtual machine images offering hope for the future. I experienced this with Smalltalk (Gemstone) apps quite some time ago and that feeling remained with Java on the desktop. W
553.
by smackay 16y ago
> A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! This is an idea that was hot way back the 80's and early 90's in the era of CASE tools. There was some limited success but only in very limited dom
554.
by smackay 16y ago
It looks like a Great Horned Owl, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Horned_Owl . They usually just sit and stare at you so drawing them should not be too much of a problem.
555.
by smackay 16y ago
I concur. I got to the second page before I found anything other than a first class result (incidently it was how to build a bookcase in 5 minutes which seems to be a dubious proposition at best). Now if you looking for information on somet
556.
by smackay 16y ago
Adding messaging to C to create Objective-C must be one of the most elegant language hacks ever. Brad Cox and Stepstone deserve all the credit not Apple (NeXT).
557.
by smackay 16y ago
I am not sure the West has the will to enforce it - certainly judging by recent events in Afghanistan where there seems to be a limited amount of support for the USA. The deciding factor might be China's position on the matter. It provides
558.
by smackay 16y ago
That might not be an option. The North Korean people are portrayed in the media as victims of the regime rather than a horde of blood-thirsty, war-mongerers so laying waste to swathes of the country with nuclear weapons is not going to go d
559.
by smackay 16y ago
I am surprised that such quality control would be required with Haskell developers. I would have thought that people with such a skillset would clearly be sufficiently motivated and capable such that filtering based on fairly rigorous crite
560.
by smackay 16y ago
I just found this one for windows, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pomodorotimer/ . The most useful feature is that you can set the work and break times - something missing from the few other timers I have tried.
561.
by smackay 16y ago
Better still would be the ability to select user country / language rather than have that decision taken for me. I am in Portugal and would like to be able to select my Amazon locale to be either the UK or USA and not my local Amazon site w
562.
by smackay 16y ago
Conquest as a purely military endeavour is not the best way to think about it - after all the people being conquered are going to be doing most of the dying. Being part of the Roman Empire probably offered many advantages - certainly being
563.
by smackay 16y ago
There is a risk of looking at this as just another "The West is best" article but for me the most interesting part was the examples of technology that were cited. Most were easy distributed and had no need of some form of central organizati
564.
by smackay 16y ago
4. Birders. Being able to positively identify that Acrocephalus warbler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrocephalus , that just disappeared into that bush destined never to return would be a blessing to just about everyone I know. Digital c
565.
by smackay 16y ago
To me this seems less like planning and more like task tracking. Everybody alread knows / has decided what the task they had to perform on each day so it was a simple matter of executing and recording the results. The hard part of planning
566.
by smackay 16y ago
I think the real point of the story is the push towards animals as entertainment rather than the fact that some hard to get footage is staged (though the two points are mixed together). The Economist had a good article on just how profitabl
567.
by smackay 16y ago
I had to endure The Sound Of Music at least 20 times with my 3-year old son. Now that he is a little older he has moved on to more entertaining fare such as Cars and Shrek. I am dreading the transition to Transformers however.
568.
by smackay 16y ago
Robert Lustig from University of California San Franciso has a great explanation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM , that shows all the metabolic pathways that fructose takes and why it is bad for you.
569.
by smackay 16y ago
Wikipedia has some useful information, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_tree_snake . In the invasive species section notice that the islands where the snake is spreading to all have US military bases of some form - the snakes seem adept
570.
by smackay 16y ago
Wouldn't it be like working for EVERY big company?

More ›