wainstead

13 ms·

91.
by wainstead 8y ago
> It's a self selecting survey I feel like I have to point this out every year, and it's one of the most important things to keep in mind about this survey. A true survey would randomly select developers from the global develop
92.
by wainstead 8y ago
Please tell me you wrote it in LaTeX. It would be another reason to buy it.
93.
by wainstead 8y ago
In "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup," Rob Walling states three wrong reasons to launch something: 1. Having a product idea 2. To get rich 3. Because it sounds like fun This and other books
94.
by wainstead 8y ago
All true, but neither should we deny ourselves a long session of "flow" if it makes us happy.
95.
by wainstead 8y ago
Nope.
96.
by wainstead 8y ago
A pretty good short story set on a tidally locked planet is "Weep For Day" by Indrapramit Das.
97.
by wainstead 8y ago
Chapter 20 of O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition" is all about batch editing and covers ed/ex as well. Maybe there's an old copy of "Unix Power Tools" over in your server room or an abandoned c
98.
by wainstead 8y ago
> As far as what you should listen to, I’d recommend something without vocals. I highly recommend "Drone Zone" on http://soma.fm "Deep Space One" and "Space Station Soma" work too.
99.
by wainstead 8y ago
Sharing the power is also really important. I founded the project PhpWiki back in 1999, and eventually saw the need to grant admin access to other developers. I haven't done any development on the project in about fifteen years but it
100.
by wainstead 8y ago
+1 for plantuml. You can make very useful sequence diagrams with it, in ascii no less.
101.
by wainstead 8y ago
Ward Cunningham. Linus Torvalds. Kent Beck. Pavel Curtis. The list goes on and on. Plenty of programmers over 40 out there. I know there are a lot reading/commenting on Hacker News too (and I'm one of them). What we really lack ar
102.
by wainstead 9y ago
And if you've never taken any MOOC before this is a great one to start with because: it's only four weeks long and it's free.
103.
by wainstead 9y ago
> how people feel about Google and Amazon, or Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s Or IBM. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/business/us-vsibm.html
104.
by wainstead 9y ago
I think one of the first design choices you have to make is: can preceded_by be NULL? The first item in the list has to do something with preceded_by. As a general rule making columns NOT NULL is prefereable; here I declared it NOT NULL, an
105.
by wainstead 9y ago
Doesn’t autoconf address these issues?
106.
by wainstead 9y ago
I’ll second this. We’ve had good experiences converting org-mode files to LaTeX for internal documents.
107.
by wainstead 9y ago
For similar content in video lecture form, "Learning How To Learn" covers the same topics, and is free from Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn It's taught by Barbara Oakley, a
108.
by wainstead 9y ago
> Shouldn't we discourage people from writing shell scripts? ...people frequently ask this? Tip #21 of "The Pragmatic Programmer" states: "Use the Power of Command Shells."
109.
by wainstead 9y ago
I don’t think it’s either-or. I find video tutorials incredibly helpful. I’m a fan of SafariBooksOnline where you get full texts and hours-long professional videos.
110.
by wainstead 9y ago
Even worse, I'm old enough to remember how the Time cover story on "cyber porn" [1] indirectly led to the introduction of bad legislation [2]. Reporting like this can have serious consequences. [1] https://content.
111.
by wainstead 9y ago
> There's no guarantee of quality other than the author's credential and history. Actually, a publication like the New York Times purports to have a strict editorial process. If Krugman were to write an op/ed piece claimin
112.
by wainstead 9y ago
And they only report on the median. We have no idea what the centers and spreads look like.
113.
by wainstead 9y ago
Henceforth known as "jasode's corollary."
114.
by wainstead 9y ago
I have long thought Perl can do anything Python can, and then some. I still use Perl one-liners to find/change strings in code bases: perl -pi -e 's/somestring/newstring/g' $(ag -l --python Foo) Does Python h
115.
by wainstead 9y ago
> even though the strongest argument frequently was that its harder to type "begin/end" than "{/}". Which is a pretty lame thing and it's not too different from Ruby, to boot.
116.
by wainstead 9y ago
I can't speak for jandrese, but I'm over 50, was taught Pascal in college, and of course I read Hacker News! (And Reddit, Fark, and Slashdot beforehand). I'm surprised you're surprised. (I'm in a Python stack these
117.
by wainstead 9y ago
I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little thing leading up to the release. I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programm
118.
by wainstead 9y ago
Long distance calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. He was writing about the public telephone system and BBSs, not the Internet. You did not dial a BBS outside of your area code (and sometimes not even within the area code becau
119.
by wainstead 9y ago
While I specifically disagree with the OP that "You can't do anything meaningful about these events," the rest of the advice is pretty dead-on. I've read it from a spectrum of authors as wide as Dale Carnegie ("How
120.
by wainstead 9y ago
But are you adjusting for inflation or comparing 1997 dollars to 2017 dollars? (which you can do here:) https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

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