tragomaskhalos

60 ms·

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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
The most egregious Excel abuse I have seen was an application that had a "database" embedded in it, i.e. a hidden sheet containing lines of data that was added to, and (linearly!) searched by, macros hanging off buttons in the "app" part of
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Interesting insight, thanks. The way that "goto considered harmful" has been taken out of context and then gone viral reminds me of how Simonyi's original Hungarian prefix scheme was similarly misunderstood and then misapplied, to the detri
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
The Greeks made very little effort to retain the phonetics of the original language. This is not a criticism of course, merely an observation, and perhaps partly driven by the impossibility of rendering certain sounds (eg "sh") in Greek. c
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
So true - but it's not just the end products of enterprise software development that are basket cases in the big orgs: on my previous project, literally every piece of (client supplied and mandated) software we had to use - CASE tool, doc
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Fascinating book, in which Gavin De Becker (the author) reiterates the advice of commenters here, to deny the stalker any form of feedback whatsoever. It also highlights how, as in the Lasdun case, it can be a completely banal and initially
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Hmmm - advice for beginners that does not mention Python or Ruby but rather headlines with C++ (admittedly caveated)? Sorry, cannot endorse.
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
It's a shame that this article focussed on startups, because the problems outlined are endemic to any endeavour where a large amount of ideas and knowledge have to be exchanged between individuals with as little friction as is humanly pos
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Meh, can't get excited about them. The hash mechanism, plus the ability to leave out the hash braces, works perfectly well enough for me. All popular languages are doomed to accrete nonessential features until they sink under their own weig
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
I suspect a lot of applets are similarly futile - we have a timesheet applet at work than somehow manages to be clunkier and more annoying in use than anything you could knock up in plain HTML plus a bit of JavaScript.
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
I too have a fair bit of Lego from when I was a kid in the 60s/70s that my kids play with today. It's worth noting that it was (relatively) expensive even back then. My observations on the quality of my old pieces is that they are generally
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by tragomaskhalos 14y ago
I had thought that the ability to do a simple quine by rewinding DATA was some weird implementation bug, so nice to see the rationale here !