spolsky

39 ms·

331.
by spolsky 18y ago
(inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424043 )
332.
by spolsky 18y ago
Speaking of Amazon -- I'd rather buy a book with lots of 1s and 5s than a book with straight 3s. Wouldn't you?
333.
by spolsky 18y ago
ASP.Net is awesome for when you need a quick-and-dirty, internal application to do something and you don't care how good the code is or how efficient it is. I used it (with C#) to build a customer service portal used internally at Fog Creek
334.
Stefan Rusek: Ready to quit ASP.Net(stefan.rusek.org)
37 points by spolsky 18y ago|29 comments
335.
by spolsky 18y ago
Conclusion: compete.com has absolutely no respectable data, so don't look there.
336.
by spolsky 18y ago
(a) It's Spolsky (b) compete.com is low by a factor of > 6. We had 2,373,587 unique visitors in the last month.
337.
by spolsky 18y ago
That is really weird. People won't lose weight to add another 5-10 years to their lives but they will for a few hundred bucks.
338.
by spolsky 18y ago
if you s/testing/unit testing/g, that's pretty much on target.
339.
by spolsky 18y ago
I'm pretty sure Uncle Bob is misrepresenting what we actually said, so I transcribed the ten minutes or so from the podcast that he's upset about here, so you can judge for yourself: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html
340.
by spolsky 18y ago
I'm going to have to disagree here, based on data. We did A/B testing of our homepage with and without a phone number for months (using odd/even days) and simply could not see any measurable difference in sales. With all due respect to Ian,
341.
by spolsky 18y ago
mercurial (distributed version control)
342.
by spolsky 18y ago
har har! I tried to parse ONE article he wrote once. It took several hours and turned out to be an enormous waste of time. The results are here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/items/2006/12/... What I don't get is why peopl
343.
by spolsky 18y ago
they do this at JFK all the time
344.
by spolsky 18y ago
It depends. A startup can move into a big open loft, buy $50 folding tables from Staples which are 2" too high and cause intense pain when you type, and spend nothing. On the other hand, if you compare the cost of a typical, Class-A cubicle
345.
by spolsky 18y ago
You will probably fail because you give up. Starting a business from scratch in a market that doesn't exist is like solving an equation with Newton's method, and you're starting with a really, really bad guess. The first iteration or two is
346.
by spolsky 18y ago
Don't hard drives use voice coils to move the arm back and forth?
347.
by spolsky 18y ago
I love outsourcing disaster stories. Business strategy 101: never outsource the functions that give you competitive advantage. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
348.
by spolsky 18y ago
Jeff didn't phrase the question carefully enough. In English if you say, "I have two children, one is a girl" that CANNOT mean both are girls. If both were girls you would never say that. Saying you have 1 girl implies that you have 1 boy.
349.
by spolsky 18y ago
to be fair neither do i
350.
by spolsky 18y ago
I have to keep reminding them that women usually do NOT want to hear about the problems they were having with their barcode scanner scanning in their comic book collections
351.
by spolsky 18y ago
By the time we left the old office, it was costing us 2% of revenue. The new office is not full yet and is somewhat more expensive, but I expect that in the long run our real estate costs will be around 4%-6% of revenue, which is the norm f
352.
by spolsky 18y ago
In other news, I've now invested 100% of my money with this nice guy Bernie Madoff. He beats the market every year!
353.
by spolsky 18y ago
It's a DAILY question on the Joel on Software discussion forum; there's a group of people there that have turned it into a mutual self-confirmation club where they all try to make each other depressed about how bad their jobs are.
354.
by spolsky 18y ago
Where's the sexism? Sexism would be assuming that the whiners were all boys, or using exclusively masculine gender instead of mixing it up a bit.
355.
by spolsky 18y ago
How else would you get down without stairs? They deploy automatically when you open the doors unless you specifically disarm them.
356.
by spolsky 18y ago
We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. Biggest waste of time in Fog Creek history. All that time would have been better spent adding features to make our products better to get more customers.
357.
by spolsky 18y ago
Digg raised $40mm in VC. VCs don't give you money to put in the bank... they give you money to hire people and invest in things that might be profitable in the future. Yes, Digg could probably have bootstrapped. But they didn't, they raised
358.
by spolsky 18y ago
I don't think these kinds of facilities swap hard drives. If one fails, you have others. By the time a lot of them fail, the whole container is probably obsolete anyway... you swap it out for a new one shipped from wherever they're manufact
359.
by spolsky 18y ago
Um, did anyone notice what month it is? If you had a fixed advertising budget for the year, wouldn't you spend most of it in the November and December issues? Almost every magazine and newspaper gets really fat at the end of the year.
360.
by spolsky 18y ago
anecdote! w00t! victory lap

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