wynand

14 ms·

91.
by wynand 17y ago
I disagree with the middle-way answer: it also doesn't require any thinking. In any forum, you should separate the emotional content from the factual content and only respond to the latter. This is quite different from taking the middle way
92.
Ask HN: What is the best virtual filesystem library you have used?
3 points by wynand 17y ago|4 comments
93.
by wynand 17y ago
As someone who's been at the receiving end of attempted teaching sessions (which occured because the self-appointed teachers overestimated their own knowledge, underestimated mine and never bothered finding out what I knew), I can only say
94.
by wynand 17y ago
That is not really context. It's a prejudiced rant. I went through an Esperanto phase some years ago and read this article back then. He's basically criticizing the language for not being as simple as it could be. He completely overlooks th
95.
by wynand 17y ago
This post makes a good companion to a post of a couple of days ago: "Why Do We Keep Building Tightly Coupled Software" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705863 ). A common theme in the comments to that story was that there are costs ass
96.
by wynand 17y ago
I know that kind of person. I think every programmer does. I don't know at which point one's value as an employee started being measured by one's tolerance for a distracting workplace. I always thought that the idea was to create conditions
97.
by wynand 17y ago
I worry that when so many comments have negative votes, readers will be more inclined to downvote future comments. While I agree with you that it's really human nature, I still think it needs to be discouraged, if only to keep HN the kind o
98.
by wynand 17y ago
This is an interesting problem and as someone who's never been much good at writing big systems, I've given it some thought. A system like Erlang helps here, I think, not because it is functional (and I say this as a functional programming
99.
by wynand 17y ago
I doubt that anyone gets twice as much work done in 8 hours as opposed to 4. This is like saying that you get 50% more work in when working 12 hours as opposed to 8. The real problem in knowledge industries as far as I can see is that too m
100.
Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers(economist.com)
9 points by wynand 18y ago|11 comments
101.
by wynand 18y ago
Their lack of (supposed: I don't know how well read either mathematician is in philosophy) philosophical credentials might justifiably invite scepticism. But surely we can only dismiss this if their argument has a flaw. And the burden of di
102.
by wynand 18y ago
I'm always amused when someone who clearly has a job he loves (and that has made him a ton of money) has the temerity to label those less lucky (i.e. those who think they're in the wrong job) as being somehow difficult. People can endure a
103.
by wynand 18y ago
We're busy porting Pootle (translate.sf.net) to Django and it's painful. Webapps don't seem to be Django's strong point (though I'm sure that it excels in other arenas). I've only played with Rails before, but I get the impression that it's
104.
by wynand 18y ago
Pretoria, South Africa
105.
by wynand 18y ago
I don't particularly like Codinghorror, but I'm not in favour of having it banned. I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains.
106.
by wynand 18y ago
That's a problem with our society. One can only have a morally superior attitude that denies the restoration of trust if you imagine that you'll never make a mistake.
107.
by wynand 18y ago
If it were a hiring mistake, wouldn't it have been letter to have let go of John? Is it really worth the risk just for linkbait? Even extreme self-promotion doesn't go this far. People may be bad at calculating risks, but the risk of negati
108.
by wynand 18y ago
While we're on anecdotes, I might as well add mine: I was in an almost 4 year relationship. During the last year I thought my girlfriend fit the mold described above perfectly. She was often downright unpleasant in ways that I never was. I
109.
by wynand 18y ago
I have no idea how execs around the world always manage to create the illusion that there is a shortage of their skills. It's easy, I suppose, when the economy is doing well, since executive failures can be covered up. I can only hope that
110.
by wynand 18y ago
The biggest deal about a culture that gratuitously accepts failure, is that people become less afraid to fail. Therefore, they are more willing to take risks.
111.
by wynand 18y ago
I fall for The 4-Hour Workweek not because I want to work less, but because I want work less at what I don't like. Markus Frind represents a lost opportunity to me; in that position, I would have spent half my time expanding business around
112.
by wynand 18y ago
I agree. These words don't sound like the words of an entrepreneur. One becomes an entrepreneur because you every inch in your body desires it; the risks are far too great to make it worthwhile otherwise. As for tax & politics: business
113.
by wynand 18y ago
From http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat06.htm : Normal in statistics generally refers to the gaussian distribution or the "normal" way we would expect errors to be distributed. When Mandelbrot says: "Granted, the bel
114.
by wynand 18y ago
Freedom is exactly right, but it seems to me that resource constraints can curtail freedom sufficiently to cause aggression. I think George Orwell said something along the lines that blocking access to resources is also an act of aggression
115.
by wynand 18y ago
I consider the ease with which one can start a business in the US to be one of the pillars of its wealth creation engine. The US, and the Valley in particular, have a culture which embraces the quick turnaround that can happen in the entrep
116.
by wynand 18y ago
She might be unusually gifted. The article states that she has a fairly excellent memory. And it is conceivable that she has a fairly high IQ. We wouldn't have scoffed as much if she mastered a branch of Mathematics instead.
117.
by wynand 18y ago
I was really inspired after the video and decided to go help out in some IRC channels and mailing lists. And then I was reminded why I stopped doing that a long time ago: there is so much snarkiness. None of these lists or IRC channels ever
118.
by wynand 18y ago
Paul Erdős was at least as deserving of the title "genius" and died quite a bit later (1996). He was a highly productive mathematician until late in his life.
119.
by wynand 18y ago
Indeed. The author is loading the word "weaker" with another meaning; a meaningless one at that: who would write an article with a title such as "It's official: Humans really are the weaker species" if it were shown that cyanide contaminati
120.
by wynand 18y ago
I think he's been a manager for too long. I can see the same reasoning coming from my father (who owns an architecture firm). With business you're spending a lot of time in meetings, travelling for business or in various phone calls. To be

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