weichi

12 ms·

61.
by weichi 16y ago
Funniest line: "CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership"
62.
by weichi 16y ago
The only decision to be made right now is whether to continue talking to them until you get an offer (or until one or both sides decide it isn't a good fit after all). There are no downsides to doing this, so you might as well do it. Once y
63.
by weichi 16y ago
I think there's a lot of truth here. I would also point out that for a lot of programming tasks, particularly in a corporate IT environment, "thinking like the customer" can be a good thing: it helps you make sure that you are building so
64.
by weichi 17y ago
How do NoSQL databases allow you to do a better job at "secondary data reuse" than a traditional RDBMS? Is it just a matter of (1) Denormalization (2) performance gains from not needing to worry about transactions?
65.
by weichi 17y ago
I don't really get this article. Dennehy writes: However, while Dyer was making a point based on insufficient reliability and robustness in the available tools, Spolsky is making the same assertion purely on the basis that it takes more ti
66.
by weichi 17y ago
Not relevant to the "hiring process" discussion, but I think the idea that: Claude Shannon didn't have to satisfy any customers. He could spend years developing a theory, whose practical value was only clear after it was sufficiently devel
67.
by weichi 17y ago
I've never written any Ruby, but I refuse to believe that Ruby cares about which line has the comma. Am I misunderstanding something?
68.
by weichi 17y ago
It's true that s-expressions don't give you a literal syntax for hashmaps or arrays, but note that some lisps (e.g. Clojure) do support these natively … and in a syntax that's better than JSON since you don't have to type all those annoying
69.
by weichi 17y ago
1. Where will you get the $5k? Your own pocket? Are you charging people $1? But it says free ... 2. Are sure you aren't going to get into legal trouble? IANAL, and I know nothing at all about the relevant laws, but still ... 3. Contest Rule
70.
by weichi 17y ago
Axler and Strang are really very different books with very different intents. The most striking example is that Gaussian elimination is practically the first thing that Strang covers, but Axler doesn't cover it at all. I can't speak in gene
71.
by weichi 17y ago
Can you be more specific? What parts of the "hot big bang, cold dark matter, accelerating expansion, geometrically flat, ~14 billion years old" model will be shown to be "deeply wrong"? Do you think that discovering, say, the nature of dark
72.
by weichi 17y ago
waterlesscloud is not saying that there is lots we still don't understand. He is saying that much, perhaps most of what we currently believe is "deeply wrong". This is of course possible, but I think it is very unlikely.
73.
by weichi 17y ago
Seriously, what are you talking about? We know a lot about cosmology. In particular there is very good evidence for for the basic model: hot big bang, cold dark matter, accelerating expansion, geometrically flat, ~14 billions years old (see
74.
by weichi 17y ago
Someone twittered "Did Scala influence Erlang?". Since Erlang development started 17 years before Scala appeared, this seems unlikely. The blog post was a deadpan attempt at a humorous response. My comment was hoping to generate more humoro
75.
by weichi 17y ago
Another little-known fact: that JVM that Erlang was originally written on? It was coded by Scott McNealy! It was a side project of his to prove to Bill Joy that he wasn't just a suit.
76.
by weichi 17y ago
It's great, and I use it all the time because it handles units properly, but once things get complicated, it's a pain (you can't define variables or easily use results of previous calculations).
77.
by weichi 17y ago
Since we're on the topic of calculators ... Is there something like Soulver or Speedcrunch, but also handles unit conversions a la google calculator? instacalc is OK, but doesn't handle units properly either. edit: www.encalc.com seems to d
78.
by weichi 17y ago
On the high school level, perhaps jr high as well, if you could replace the 5th day at school with a day in a workplace - some kind of internship - then I think you would end up with a better system. Perhaps vastly better.
79.
by weichi 17y ago
An interesting thing about the Casimir force is that there is a derivation due to Lifshitz that doesn't use the concept of a quantized electromagnetic field; it uses zero-point fluctuations of the charge distribution in the plates to get th
80.
by weichi 17y ago
No. The energy you get out when the plates would repel will be equal to the energy required to push the plates together in the first place. No free lunch!
81.
by weichi 17y ago
Whether or not "don't spend your families life savings on your startup" is good advice or not really depends on the amount of the savings, the age of the individual/family, and the family's earning potential, etc. Losing all of your $20k sa