spolsky

30 ms·

271.
by spolsky 17y ago
somebody want to explain this? infinity = 1.0e400
272.
by spolsky 17y ago
This is the kind of faulty reasoning that might be caused by looking at anecdotes (e.g. the exceptional story of Richard Branson) and assuming that a single anecdote tells you something about the world, when actually you are ignoring the ot
273.
by spolsky 17y ago
What's "peer review"? An academic article in a journal that's "peer reviewed" has been reviewed by what, 2 peers? Ok, 6? Jeff's posts are "peer reviewed" by hundreds or thousands of developers and you can read the reviews right there at the
274.
by spolsky 17y ago
Dharmesh, the free option in a freemium model usually exists to spread the word, but we have StackOverflow.com to spread the word. And most of these sites people are building will have big audiences, and those audiences are getting it free,
275.
by spolsky 17y ago
biztravel is mostly intended so that I could dogfood StackExchange ( http://stackexchange.com ), which is our white label version of the code that runs StackOverflow.com. StackExchange is currently in invite-only beta. I didn't really expec
276.
by spolsky 17y ago
And of course you can override CSS, which we didn't bother to do.
277.
by spolsky 17y ago
Wow, I was impressed by how closely this mea culpa was the same as Amazon's when they had that big S3 outage: Compare to: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?...
278.
by spolsky 17y ago
They are pretty surprisingly hard to get. At the beginning of the summer I tried to buy, I think, 20 drives, to upgrade all the developers to SSDs and I remember being surprised that I cleared out Amazon AND NewEgg completely to get the dri
279.
by spolsky 17y ago
Read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/13.html It's pretty rare for airlines to be honest about delays at departure time. Rather than update their online databases when they know they're running late, they wait until the f
280.
by spolsky 17y ago
Jeez, you guys. Dvorak is just promoting his podcast, "No Agenda." If you've never listened to it, it's the most bizarre combination of kooky conspiracy theories from former MTV VJ Adam Curry, mostly of the "9-11 never actually happened" va
281.
by spolsky 17y ago
Don't forget that includes queens, staten island, etc, where people actually have a car or two. $1000/month in car payments = $2000/month in pretax salary. That means a $60,000 salary in NY goes as far as an $84,000 salary - car costs.
282.
by spolsky 17y ago
Yeah. 900,000 developers isn't even remotely credible.
283.
by spolsky 17y ago
CoLA figures for New York are B.S. They're all based on buying an identical basket of goods. New Yorkers don't buy the same goods. 54% of New Yorkers don't have cars, because we have good mass transit. New Yorkers live in smaller apartments
284.
by spolsky 17y ago
Oh! I thought that was the joke. The sign that you're a bad programmer is that you implement a page rate limit on one of your properties (google sites), only to serve up the exact same page out of another one of your properties (google cach
285.
by spolsky 17y ago
I suspect it's the New York Times.
286.
by spolsky 17y ago
Wow, you could reverse all these and have a pretty good blog post.
287.
by spolsky 17y ago
I never asserted we have better performance because we have great programmers (although we do). I have stated that there is a performance benefit to using the Microsoft Stack relative to other common platforms like PHP, because C# just perf
288.
by spolsky 17y ago
That's it! Close down the Internet!
289.
by spolsky 17y ago
Really simple. Internet merchants have to collect sales tax on residents of any state where they have a physical presence. Amazon has been careful to limit their physical presence to Washington so that their sales are tax free in the 49 oth
290.
by spolsky 17y ago
Anyone have any evidence that this works? Other than just the fact that it sounds like a nice idea. In years of calling references I never found them to be a predictor of anything at all . You get great references for awful candidates an
291.
by spolsky 17y ago
In practice I've found that the quality from component cables is just as good as HDMI, even if it is analog.
292.
by spolsky 17y ago
The author doesn't mention the concept of anchoring. A $40 HDMI cable sounds expensive. But when you're buying a $400 bluray player, another $40 for the cable doesn't sound so expensive, because you're mentally comparing the price to $400.
293.
by spolsky 17y ago
Right. What's so "Er" about that? Maybe you don't notice that you hired an ax murderer until the third month.
294.
StackOverflow Podcast 56 - Spolsky, Atwood, and Calacanis(blog.stackoverflow.com)
2 points by spolsky 17y ago|1 comments
295.
by spolsky 17y ago
Now that I think about it, there's a strong selection bias here. Private companies are, well, private, and don't get very much news coverage. Many super-profitable private software companies that never took investment are undercovered by th
296.
by spolsky 17y ago
Paul, this says more about the people that you know than anything else. Nearly all the people I know who got rich from software were at Microsoft during the IPO. That doesn't prove much. Tim Gill made close to $1b from Quark. Jim Goodnight
297.
by spolsky 17y ago
jeez you kids these days with your 1200 baud modems have no patience
298.
ServerFault launches - it's StackOverflow for sysadmins(serverfault.com)
135 points by spolsky 17y ago|27 comments
299.
by spolsky 17y ago
might want to switch to decaf, there...
300.
by spolsky 17y ago
Sheesh. I am so SICK AND TIRED of these articles that are like, "here's my anecdote, therefore, this is proof of a general pattern that's ALWAYS true." It's like people don't even have the vaguest grasp of science. Why bother when you can t

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