wanorris

38 ms·

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by wanorris 19y ago
In my experience, JavaScript has tremendously powerful capabilities both in terms of OO and in terms of FP, and if you can get comfortable with it, you can mix the idioms seamlessly. Using something like the Prototype library helps -- it ad
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by wanorris 19y ago
> it's less powerful Actually, in some ways, JS-style prototype-based inheritance is more powerful. You can emulate class-based inheritance, but you can also use a variety of other models, such as adding in only a single specified met
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by wanorris 19y ago
> In short: If you don't want to create a lot of wealth, chances are, you won't create any. Completely depends on what you're trying to do. It's easy to make a small, sustainable business in some areas, especially service businesses. If
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by wanorris 19y ago
> I read this Jeff's blog as some is interesting, but I always laugh at how he is so pro-windows. On the plus side, he's not pro-Windows in the sense of being an evangelist or anti-something else. He's been working for a consulting busi
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by wanorris 19y ago
I would say that there's a continuum based on what you're trying to build. If you're trying to build something that needs huge networking effects to succeed (general-purpose social networks have been an obvious example in the recent past),
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by wanorris 19y ago
I love VirtualBox, but it's takes up a lot of space to keep several XP images on my notebook. The fact that this lets you test in IE5.5 through IE8 on a single image is a nice win, IMHO.
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by wanorris 19y ago
> I grew up in the suburbs and never met anyone who met that stereotype. I've definitely met those people in Texas.
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by wanorris 19y ago
> The public school system is probably a waste of time for a bright child who can learn on his or her own unless the child lives near an exceptionally good public school. More bright children who have proven that they can learn things o
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by wanorris 19y ago
If you live in a metropolitan area (not a given -- like I said, college towns are a nice alternative) -- you generally have the option of living inside the city proper, or living in a suburb. If you want your kids to have a yard to play in,
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by wanorris 19y ago
Also, go through all the domain suffixes you can register and look for ideas. Sometimes you can get a memorable domain name that way. Sites like last.fm have done a good job of this. Free (unregistered as of this writing!) example: stepinsi
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by wanorris 19y ago
While a representative democracy cannot be considered a tyranny in the sense of being run by a single ruler with absolute power, a common, looser definition is that a tyranny is simply an oppressive and unjust government. If you believe tha
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by wanorris 19y ago
> I think the key is to get the hell out of the suburban hell holes that riddle North America like cancerous spots on an otherwise healthy lung, and find cities in which you can live I don't think suburbs are the end of the world, espec
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by wanorris 19y ago
Sorry, I guess that was unduly harsh. Maybe I misread the tone of your prior post. Referring to the social contract of a democracy as simply taking things by force sounded to me like deeply seated anger, and I guess I responded accordingly.
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by wanorris 19y ago
As far as I know, there are countries that still accept immigrants if you feel that the social contract of the nation you are currently inhabiting is unreasonable. Failing that, there's always working for political change, or even armed ins
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by wanorris 19y ago
> As in, they force you to go there. At least in the US you are under no obligation to send your kids to public school. You can send them to a private or parochial school or home school your children. Why? Do you think making education
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by wanorris 19y ago
It wouldn't necessarily even have to beat it -- you could use synergy. For example: here are movies a bunch of your friends are watching, and here's how much we estimate you'll like each one. Or, to flip it around, out of all the movies we
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by wanorris 19y ago
If you needed to, you could solve most of the problems with SimpleDB by writing a server that wraps it and provides consistency checks, sorting and such. I was considering writing that for a little while. Then they announced that they were
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by wanorris 19y ago
> I suspect this is similar for 21-year olds in the states. I certainly don't want to call my fellow Americans particularly mature, but it's pretty rare for people to wait until 21 to drink here, so I think the effect is dispersed.
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by wanorris 19y ago
> i think you're making too big of a deal out of hardware choice. you're talking about people who don't know if they want a gui or not, yet you think those same people will want to choose what type of computer to run it on? as if. For c
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by wanorris 19y ago
I've found Dr. Richard Hamming's talk to scientists, "You and Your Research," to have useful advice on the subject. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html In particular, he talks about keeping track of a set of importa
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by wanorris 19y ago
> Not on the heavy consumer apps, eh? No, the Microsoft people I've met tend to be from the language teams, mostly because I'm working a lot with IronPython and F# in my codebase, so that's the kind of thing I go to conferences about. A
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by wanorris 19y ago
> You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste. Fair enough. In that sense, then, I wouldn't say that programmers at Microsoft lack taste by definition. There are things at Microso
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by wanorris 19y ago
Taste is also orthogonal to skill at programming. Apple had better taste then Microsoft even when their code was absolute crap under the hood.
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by wanorris 19y ago
> I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn. Like I said, they may not be typical, but most of the Microsoft people I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that. If where you come fro
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by wanorris 19y ago
The Windows 7 team seems to recognize that they have to recover from a colossal screwup. Whether they understand what they need to do to make that happen -- and whether they can execute on those ideas -- I have no idea.
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by wanorris 19y ago
"i think microsoft beat apple because apple was busy beating itself. apple had about a ten-year lead in gui operating systems, but couldn't keep up" Microsoft gave people a clear transition to a windowing environment -- back when people wer
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by wanorris 19y ago
Certainly a valid point. And PG's criticisms were deserved as well. At the same time, I can't help but think some of this is an overreaction. Microsoft beat Apple as well as IBM in the market the first time by letting users pick their har
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by wanorris 19y ago
Perhaps the programmers I've met from Microsoft are atypical, but they've been smart as hell. Whatever Microsoft's problems are (and clearly they have some), it isn't that they don't have any smart people on campus there.
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by wanorris 19y ago
EBay is having trouble with their core operations. Whether Skype is profitable or not (I assume they are), since it has nothing to do with their core auctions business, EBay wants to get rid of it to focus on more important issues.
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by wanorris 19y ago
They must be investing in some enormous infrastructure. Server farms, international markets, maybe Akamai. But in general, it's not uncommon for companies that raise a lot of capital for rapid growth to not be profitable. Back in AOL's heyd

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