jimfl
jimfl on Hacker News
If you work at McDonalds, you probably fed a soldier or a weapons designer, or CIA field operative. You'd have to drop out of productive society entirely to escape this dynamic.
Yahoo! engineers probably could do this. Yahoo! middle management not so much.
/usr/games/worms is the best shell ever.
This dynamic seems to give an advantage to corporations who have a systematic, always-full pipeline of patent applications. The barrier to entry for a single inventor for filing a patent is pretty large.
If nothing else, cyberspace can be delineated economically.
In meatspace, the economic leverage of a traditional business is scarcity and the leverage of traditional parasitic distribution business is distance. The economics of cyberspace can be based on neither of these things, because once a single instance of something is created, it is everywhere without scarcity. Traditional business attemts to create artificial scarcity and distance, but this is madness.
Security red flag: passwords are "secure enough."
It would be cool to have an external source of quests/bounties, such as user stories to be implemented, trouble tickets to be addressed, etc.
I have a DVD player, and a broadband connection. Without getting into something (cable, set top streaming, torrents) for which there are investments in time, energy, and money, there is no legal way for me to watch the second season of game of thrones.
Once I get into something, there's a lot of other content available. Cable is the least flexible. Streaming is buying into a walled garden which might disappear in a year, or change TOS, or some other distasteful eventuality. If some popular show drives me to piracy, and I make that investment of time and energy, then that's how I'm going to get all the rest of my content from then on out.
"...a feature, not a company," is high praise. That's how it should be, as long as that feature can be combined with other such features to create new things.
Very few users are well served by being locked into a single vendor's constellation of hastily slapped together aquihires.
Except that every time they can, Amazon reduces their prices. Any investor who thinks that they will at some point increase margins doesn't listen to what Jeff Bezos says: we're good at running low margin businesses, and that's what we will continue to do.
Part of preparation of this kind is merely getting comfortable with the idea of problem solving and coding in a high pressure environment, many otherwise excellent candidates eliminate themselves by choking at the whiteboard or collaborative editing tool. A day of serial technical interviews can be a brutal exercise that is very different from flow coding.
Every line of code is a liability.
Every comment is also a liability, especially in light of the fact that the comment may, over time, drift away from the code. I sometimes wish I had an IDE that would color nearby comments red (and prevent commits) when code changes.
Which is to say, make comments where necessary, but own the liability, and strive to remove comments you find by making the code more obvious, just as you would strive to remove code to make it simpler.
If you want to record your intent, write a test.
Edit: accidentally a word.
One sign that you're lying to yourself: you're actualizing a vision.
Give up trying to measure people against some standard yardstick. It doesn't work in school, it doesn't work at work. People have a complex set of inter-relating competencies, and managing them is challenging work, not an exercise in stack ranking them by some index. Don't be lazy.
Good kids don't get detention.
Earlier this year, I removed the clock from my toolbar. If I need to know the time, I can hit my iPad, or do a 'date' command in a terminal window. If I know that I have an impending appointment, I will run a clock app on the iPad.
I don't have a cell phone, and after I put my pocket watch through the laundry, I don't carry a watch either.
Unfortunately, as a software developer, pretty much every day is perforated with meetings, and as a bus commuter, I am locked to various schedules, so I can't quite go timeless.
For the XBox model to work, apps will have to cost $40.
Seems like another section of a businesses disaster recovery plan should be the one on how to resume operations after a government raid.
Then there's probably an AbstractCPUBuilderFactory to go along with it.
App idea: Twitter client with a breathalyzer.
Is location, role, and current/desired comp sufficient to match employers with talent?
Rule of thumb: run test coverage. Consider deleting any code not covered before writing a test to cover it.
Human beings are the worst sort of people.
So, you're saying they're pirates.
One interesting side effect of this tactic is that actual LOIC users may now have some plausible deniability, as they can claim they were duped into participation.
I have found Flipboard + the @newsyc20 Twitter feed to be an ideal way to read Hacker News.