zenbowman

9 ms·

31.
by zenbowman 11y ago
Organic food is fine. But it is, fundamentally, an anti-technology approach to growing food. You should be free to eat it if you want. The point is simply that firms that reject technology should not be described as "tech" compani
32.
by zenbowman 11y ago
It's a little ironic that goodeggs is considered a food technology firm, when it has nothing to do with technology, and in fact has a rejectionist approach to technology in the first place. Monsanto and Cargill are food technology firm
33.
by zenbowman 11y ago
It isn't just corporations that are not fond of remote work. As a lay-employee, I am not fond of remote work either. I would much rather have all my teammates in the same room. Tribal? Yes, unapologetically so.
34.
by zenbowman 12y ago
There is no advantage of a schema-less design, because there is always a schema. It is just a matter of whether the schema is made explicit and enforced, or whether it is scattered all over the application code.
35.
by zenbowman 12y ago
I'd say the opposite. The current engineering market is too much like the contractor world. Real progress is made by working for decades on a particular team, on a particular problem set. See the work done in Bell Labs in the 40s and 7
36.
by zenbowman 12y ago
If you are going for an undergraduate degree, a bad academic reputation due to lack of research emphasis is a plus. Research universities do not care about undergraduates, and professors in research universities tend not to even like teachi
37.
by zenbowman 12y ago
For one, there's greater value placed on these competitions outside the United States. Inside the US, a talented programmer will default to working on open source in order to get noticed or create a portfolio worth talking about. Outsi
38.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Fantastic read, thank you
39.
by zenbowman 12y ago
In most cases, readability is not a concern for inter-program messaging. A good logging system in your program should take care of the readability concerns. I've never come across a single instance of a text format for interprogram mes
40.
by zenbowman 12y ago
I'd argue that very few tech companies are like RapGenius. The new wave of "X service on the web" companies are not tech companies, they are "X service" companies, whether that X is travel, music, laundry, home clea
41.
by zenbowman 12y ago
The only problem here is that RG is classified as a "tech" company. Its a legitimate business, but they don't sell technology, and neither does technology make or break them. They happen to use web technology, but how is that
42.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Nope, Slick is the best one that I ran across for Scala. I just found writing the classes painful so I wrote slickint to deal with generation of classes, and it was reasonable after that.
43.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Slick in my experience is pretty unusable even for experienced Scalaphiles. I couldn't use it until I wrote a wrapper for it: https://github.com/zenbowman/slickint And even then, I think I by far prefer raw SQL to
44.
by zenbowman 12y ago
A lot of the regulation has allowed people to die when there was a chance they would have lived without it. Regulations on advertising and OTC drugs are absolutely needed, but stopping a doctor from prescribing a risky drug to a terminally
45.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Exactly. I cannot imagine this kind of sloppy thinking being applied to any other form of engineering. Machine time eventually translates to user time. Slow code leads to poor user experience and if your product is successful, wasting the t
46.
by zenbowman 12y ago
While many people struggle to get time off, I think a big part of it is that people feel guilty when they take time off, even if their employers allow it. Do you honestly believe people in the caliber of Matt Cutts, Jeff Dean or Simon Peyto
47.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Yeah it is hardly low profile. It was a very well funded project that promised the moon and failed to deliver despite absorbing a massive amount of DoD money. A lot of AI researchers at the lab I worked at weren't big fans as there was
48.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Just to clarify, it seems that by "tech companies" you mean "software companies". I think it is a little funny that a company like AirBnB would qualify as a tech company (even though I would classify it as a travel agenc
49.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Sure, but none of this points to high-performance languages being a shrinking niche. They will continue to dominate low-level code and library code. Less low-level code will be written each year than high-level code, but it'll still be
50.
by zenbowman 12y ago
I don't think so. In established fields of engineering, optimization takes up as much, if not more time, than design. Computing is a new enough field that so far that hasn't been the case, but I think with the increase of media pr
51.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Its a giant scam. Avoid it at all costs. I'm dead serious.
52.
by zenbowman 12y ago
"In companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, more experienced developers (in their 40s and 50s) are pretty well represented" For sure, that's one of the prime reasons I moved to a tech megacorp from the startup world, I wante
53.
by zenbowman 12y ago
The difference between engineering and tinkering is discipline. Not to say tinkering is bad, its perfectly fine when trying to create the latest viral app or when learning how to do something. When engineering something, discipline is requi
54.
by zenbowman 12y ago
This very much depends on what you care about. If you are running a 100,000 machine datacenter, a 12% efficiency improvement may save you millions of dollars in computing and energy costs a year. That is certainly worth a doubling of specif
55.
by zenbowman 12y ago
How so? It is still the dominant language for large-scale low-level systems. Critical software driving submarines, power plants, financial exchanges and medical devices is likely written in C++. The code on most of SpaceX's spacecrafts
56.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Sounds more like a team than a family. One of the primary distinguishing characteristics of a family is that members never exit the family once they are in. A second is that families are decidedly not meritocratic.
57.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Lots of lessons for software engineers in this lovely interview. Like Knuth, Pierre Sprey seems to relish "beauty in the particular". "The goal of generalization had become so fashionable that a generation of mathematicians h
58.
by zenbowman 12y ago
Voice is a separate issue, but this has the same problem as a touchscreen. We are very sensitive to touch. It's quite possible that with the proliferation of touchscreens, children may find increasingly less tactile feedback in the wor
59.
by zenbowman 12y ago
A very good point. I was speaking to a cabbie in Vancouver, where a cab medallion is right about half a million dollars (Canadian). Cab drivers effectively have the choice of being indentured labor to the cab companies who buy medallions, o
60.
by zenbowman 12y ago
How is this different from bodybuilding.com's social network?

More ›