alphazero
Re:SQL Databases Are An Overapplied Solution
on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:51AM (#697657)
Agreed. (Prepare to be downvoted for making a rational statement contrary to the prevailing fads.)
Re:SQL Databases Are An Overapplied Solution
on Friday July 10, 2009 @08:27AM (#697542)
"SQL Databases"? SQL is a language.
"Queries [in a relational database] do not need to be particularly fast, they just need to return correct results eventually."
I stopped reading at that point. The article is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with this profession.
Re:Swedish Army Personality Test
on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @05:51PM (#694779)
Nevertheless they seek techno-drones.
Re:Python: What the Hell is a Slot?
on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @10:11AM (#691475)
Given an unknown object, how would your program distinguish between meta-info and property?
Re:Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
on Monday July 06, 2009 @10:20AM (#689668)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_cavity
Glad we've finally cleared up the function of that space filling matter.
Aristotle asserted that the brain's function was to cool the blood. Later, it was asserted that it was responsible for cognitive facilities. And now, finally, we realize that its job is to fill the space in between one's ear ...
Re:Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
on Monday July 06, 2009 @09:35AM (#689604)
I guess nature misunderstood the problem domain of organizing the body:
Re:Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
on Monday July 06, 2009 @08:08AM (#689500)
"Sorry John, we can't promote you. You're just too good at what you do."
It would have been far more interesting to investigate alternative structures for large organizations. And in terms of strict hierarchical systems, the omission of a consideration of the military is rather glaring.
Re:I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
on Saturday June 27, 2009 @12:03PM (#676935)
Workers in any field that requires creativity, yet is subject to industrial production and economic realities, will likely air the same sentiments.
Re:Smalltalk: Our Death has been Exaggerated
on Sunday May 10, 2009 @06:04PM (#602566)
Its a tragedy that all geek theaters are ultimately reduced to a chorus ...
Re:Smalltalk: Our Death has been Exaggerated
on Sunday May 10, 2009 @04:09PM (#602414)
Look up "more" in the dictionary.
Re:Smalltalk: Our Death has been Exaggerated
on Sunday May 10, 2009 @02:37PM (#602351)
He seems to miss the point that TDD is more critical in a weakly typed/dynamically typed system. Yes, C, C++, and Java didn't have TDD when they started, but there was this thing called a compiler ...
Re:Is There Anything Good About Men?
on Friday May 01, 2009 @09:53PM (#589425)
"If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?"
A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures.
In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...
Re:The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next
on Friday May 01, 2009 @07:25PM (#589304)
(Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on a .plan ...)
I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you success in your endeavors.
Re:Maybe Twitter should be social from the start?
on Friday May 01, 2009 @06:18PM (#589250)
Pray tell us why it "isn't working", Dave. (btw society != clique)
Re:The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next
on Friday May 01, 2009 @06:15PM (#589248)
Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.
Re:Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston
on Friday May 01, 2009 @05:31PM (#589194)
And following the link trails we find:
Paul Graham (Viaweb) On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixz...
Is that "Y"?
Re:Integral House: math professor and violinist commissions architectu...
on Friday May 01, 2009 @05:20PM (#589181)
"Masterpiece" is pushing it. The section is entirely banal, with little imagination beyond plan extrusion. When you think of the possibilities of the site, the client, and the conceptual domain (math, music), it is more of a missed opportunity.
Re:Google: Mowing lawn with goats
on Friday May 01, 2009 @01:05PM (#588766)
The Swiss have been doing this for a while. Saw a herd back in 2000 in Thusis munching on the grass near the railway station.
"Nanite : A self-assembling fabric of Ruby daemons"
Nanite seems to be laying the foundation for something similar to Heroku.http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/10/11/merbcamp-keynote-and-introducing-nanitehttp://github.com/ezmobius/nanite/blob/b9f5af0569abf25c43602ade51c1da2964fa98e1/README.rdoc
Re:Clojure: It’s About the Libraries
on Thursday April 30, 2009 @11:08PM (#588010)
Agreed. Erlang is actually very friendly. (Much more so than Clojure, for that matter ..)
Re:Now Hiring If You're Young (1998)
on Thursday April 30, 2009 @10:33PM (#587977)
Now that's funny. "new concepts". "DOS". Its actually quite amusing for hackers in my age group to watch the kids "discover" ancient programming history (again (and again (...)))
Re:Why Firefox Has Jumped the Shark
on Thursday April 30, 2009 @09:10AM (#586766)
Using same here. Main UI criticism of S4b is the placement of the tabs on top of the window, which has overloaded their usage semantics. In any event, I switched to safari when Firefox 3 something kept crashing on me. Switched to safari and haven't looked back.
Re:A dispatch from the "programmers liberation front"
on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @09:02PM (#584365)
I agree with you regarding the clumsy gui -- UML editors suffer from the same general problem. What I took away from his presentation were the 2 core points:
1) linear expression is intrinsic to text but not intrinsic to programs.
2) the machine is more than a tablet.
Who knows? May be the ideal interface is actually voice based ...
A dispatch from the "programmers liberation front"
Johnathan Edwards may be perched in the academia, but he's a hacker and one of us:http://subtextual.org/young.jpgHe's making progress on his attempt to reinvent the programming wheel.Latest news: http://coherence-lang.org/& This is absolutely must watch: http://subtextual.org/subtext2.html
Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls
on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @02:38PM (#583735)
Rich Hickey discussed his using the trampoline pattern in the clojure implementation a while ago: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...
Re:Alpha male programmers aren't keeping women out
on Monday April 27, 2009 @09:59PM (#582534)
Its the tools, stupid.
We're an arts and crafts "industry". Only a fraction of our time is spent thinking about the problem in the abstract. A great deal of it is spent wrestling with our primitive tool kit to realize the concept.
When programming becomes entirely an intellectual field, you will see the same gender ratios as you see in other mature sciences.
Re:Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don't want to
on Monday April 27, 2009 @01:32PM (#581684)
+1.
Twitter is definitely a useful communication channel, and it stands out from the rest of the fads: email, sms, tweeter. That pretty much covers all the modalities.