jakejake

I don't even know what it means to say that Perl 6 has been released anymore.

The author seems to think that somebody would want this machine so badly as to break into somebody's house?

It's interesting that the money at stake at the time when Gates and Allen started Microsoft was in the 5 figure range. It's funny how in hindsight everybody was trying to "change the world" but in reality, they were saying nothing of the sort and were probably only hoping for a 6-figure paycheck.

I wonder how we'll look back at all of the people currently proclaiming that they are, in fact, trying to change the world..?!

Yea the title should really be "what I learned from losing $200 million of other people's money"

I think that is how the "reputation traps" develop.

Also when external vendors start dropping hints to you that they haven't been paid for their previous invoice (and you are not responsible for finances).

Having the entire team suddenly focus on a superfluous project like the company intranet or any non-critical busywork. Not a good sign!

I definitely agree that's the way it should be. I've seen the reality inside a few large corporations and basically nothing would surprise me.

Having built several in multiple languages, I'd recommend for anyone to build their own email client.

It's quite easy to get the basics up and running but quickly becomes tricky getting all of the messages to display consistently. Then you can add embedded images and attachments to the mix. The list goes on and on. But, you really will learn a lot about protocols, parsing text & binary data, working with legacy formats and just all kinds of interesting stuff. Even if you don't wind up with an amazing client, it's still a lot of fun!

We have an integration with google calendar and they seem to make endless tweaks, like date+time zone requirements. About every six months I have to go in and undo what was done the last time. Debugging is also a nightmare when it comes to validating calendar feeds.

Every time I see "google calendar" in our issue tracker, I die a little inside.

I can imagine this as not totally different from software dev and QA. Many times the development team puts in some feature that doesn't have any visible output for the testers to test - rather it is some internal change or improvement.

The QA department, then responsible for testing this new "feature" will most likely go off of a script that was sent to them by the developers to verify the old and new behavior, going on some metric that perhaps they don't really understand.

In some cases, the QA may actually have to rely on a tool actually built by the developers to test the feature. So in some cases the QA, not being software developers and not responsible for actually reviewing the code, will have to somewhat go on faith that the scripts and tools provided by the developers are accurate.

I'm not saying that means the engineers were responsible at VW, but it does explain how something could slip through the checks-and-balances that have been set up.

My opinion is because HN is highly entrepreneur+VC focused and tech happens to be the area of interest. As such the discussion leans towards investments with huge payouts. Companies that are profitable and don't need funding are not particularly interesting to investors.

If this was a tech-only forum then the business guys & gals probably wouldn't even be welcome, & vice-versa if it were a business-only forum. It's an interesting mix here that probably wouldn't normally have a lot to talk about together. But I do think it puts stars in a lot of programmers eyes who might not otherwise care about that kind of stuff.

I was thinking the same thing about all of them except the girl who's boyfriend fabricated his life story for her.

When you submit your app you can opt for Apple to release it immediately upon approval, or wait for you to manually release it.

Mozilla likely submitted the app a couple of weeks ago and just hit the release button today.

I worked on a healthcare IT system at one point as a consultant. I tried to the best of my ability to improve upon the UI or the software, at least for the small tasks commissioned to me. I think that most of the other programmers tried to do the same.

It was extremely difficult because the software was written over a long period of time by multiple generations of programming teams and programming styles. It was hodge-podge to say the least. Take that system and integrate it with another equally hodge-podge system. Then add a couple more hodge-podge systems to that. There were just lots of redundancies and disconnects. I did feel sorry for the people who were going to have to use that system.

I'd say that medical administrative software is ripe for "disruption" just because it sucks so badly. Except for the fact that the systems are a) huge b) require extensive domain knowledge c) are regulated d) sales of such systems are extremely political and e) there's no way to do an end-run around the administrators who are purchasing these systems. It doesn't seem very suited for a "move quickly and break things" scrappy startup.

"I sat through a 3 hour meeting today and it was pure torture."

"I skipped breakfast today. I'm starving."

If you are truly uncomfortable with these sentences then it's possible that you are either a bit overly sensitive, or else you have trouble differentiating between literal statements and common english expressions.

The language will compile, but all of the UI frameworks for iOS aren't available on other platforms.

It strikes me as similar to how .NET is cross platform. Command line apps will run, but anything with a GUI would have to be written with a cross-platform UI kit.

If there's some technical or performance reason for getting rid of this as far as the swift compiler goes, then I guess whatever just tell me how to increment a number and that's what I'll do.

But to try to say that x++ is complicated to understand? It's no more complicated than a lot of operations. I don't think anyone would intuit what x%2 means either. There are things that you can get just by looking at it, and others that you just have to learn once, then you go "oh, that's what it does" and move on.

I'd hate to think what would happen if one were to run into a ternary operator!

Interesting, I guess it is always surprising when you actually log stuff as opposed to just going by memory.

It's kinda maddening sometimes, I have an app that every time XCode is updated it pretty much has at least one little change that has to be done to get it to build again. It makes me somewhat dread every update.

But, at the same time, they keep users upgrading at the same relentless pace and so you generally don't need to worry about supporting 10 year old versions of the OS.

Cuts both ways I guess!

It's interesting that new devices always have a ratio of "cool factor" vs dorky, show-off or elitist (partly due to jealousy as well as actual dorkiness). The iPhone for example, I'd sa initially had about 90% cool factor, and about 10% of the negative. It's evolved to where probably only a tiny minority of people consider an iPhone to be dorky.

Google glass, on the other hand, seems in my observation to have launched with about 25% cool factor and 75% dorky, show-off, elitist kinda vibe to it. It devolved from there.

Despite Apple's reputation for coolness, the watch seems like it's at about 50/50 on the scale at best. I love technology and probably have a reputable score on the dorkiness scale myself. But, when I see Apple watches, they even seem a bit much for me.

I find it ironic that the iPhone itself probably got a significant number of people out of the habit of wearing watches. Once my phone could tell me what time it was, that was the end of my watch-wearing days. Though, I never really liked them anyway.

Just curious what benefit do you get from sleep tracking? I had sleep problems for a while. I wasn't really sure how helpful it would be for an app to tell me I had a crappy night's sleep! Is there more to it than that?

I usually have error logging/reporting with full stack trace. This was a quick one-off that I definitely didn't mean to commit! One web app that I worked on years ago would save the entire session state of the user on error. We had a dev tool that would allow us to jump in with all of our session state all set exactly as this user on the exact spot where they had the error. It was pretty great for reproducing most errors except one pesky one that would show up in the logs randomly.

Finally, one day I accidentally triggered that annoying error by doing a specific sequence of things and then clicking the browser back button a few times, then doing another specific sequence. That was a day of celebration!

I have tried it and it's not horrible. The difficulty is that the chrome is styled one way, and the text inside the editors is styled another way. And neither of them are quite able to style everything!

I found the dark themes to look great with certain, staged screenshots. But then when you use it, the scrollbars are blaring white. Or the bar that shows your code blocks can't be styled (controlled by the OS). So you wind up with a mostly dark theme that has 2 or 3 blaring, ugly, mismatched elements that defeat the purpose.

Styling the editor window is something I've spend days tediously trying to tweak a nice pastel color pallet (that pretty much every app with a dark theme uses). But all the included ones are bright neon colors or just radically weird color choices. I've been able to get my code window 95% the way I'd want, but then all of the other windows like the explorer or the console don't match! The settings are all over the place and sometimes take a restart of Eclipse to if you got the right setting or not.

Basically I just gave up with the dark theme because it seems there's no way to get it consistent.

Ah, but every few months there's a new celebrity!

I think they were onto a great idea, but their main premise that people want to design their own clothes was wrong. People want to buy clothes that are a known brand or recommended, worn and endorsed by tastemakers. They have a platform that could enable those tastemakers to create their own custom brands. Celebrities are all over this stuff - making their own perfumes, clothing, accessories. There's a ton of more indie-level celebrities that would love to do this but don't have the connections.

Even still, the outcome for most businesses is failure. And I'd assume you are correct that fashion is probably one of the more fickle businesses.

Probably wasn't an attempt at being funny, but more just named after desktop debugging tools for inspecting threads and such that have "spy" as part of the name.

The skull, perhaps was just having some fun, though!

In a moment of pure debugging hell and hate, I put an alert with the text "WTF!" for a condition that should never occur. I could never get it to reproduce and, due to some distraction, I checked in the code with the alert still there.

I probably don't have to mention who got that alert while working one day. The president of the company, of course! Luckily for me it was not a customer-facing function & they found it funny.