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jayvanguardon Build Windows apps from your Objective-C code

OS compatibility layers never work well. I expect this to fail within a couple of years max. It'll be used to convince people to do a quick one-time port of their iOS apps over. Microsoft won't be able to keep it with Apple's API changes so it will always be behind and crappy.

jayvanguardon Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering (2001) [pdf]

I interpret it differently. Layering and libraries were solved ages ago (although we have many, many more layers now). This isn't what people were striving for when they talked about reuse in-the-large. It was more about domain models and objects like having a common Customer entity or reusing an insurance domain object model across different customers.

Horizontal re-use has always been possible but vertical reuse is a pipe dream.

jayvanguardon Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering (2001) [pdf]

What a stellar list. The reuse part in particular needs to be read by many people. As he points out, reuse in-the-large will never happen for very good people reasons, not technology reasons.

> REU5. Pattern reuse is one solution to the problems inherent in code reuse.

Patterns are just Reuse in-the-small anyways.

jayvanguardon My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One

It really isn't a good read. I own the first three volumes. They are really just useful as a relatively comprehensive reference text explaining a lot of base CS algorithms and structures.

jayvanguardon Why can’t we read anymore?

https://xkcd.com/1227/

There they are... see 1894 and 1895 in particular.

jayvanguardon Why can’t we read anymore?

That is my take as well. Vague allusions to current research but no hard cites. Seems like recycled trope of "modern life is too busy and our brains are rotting".

I read a great excerpt from something published in the 1800s complaining about the same thing... I'll have to dig it up.

jayvanguardon Why can’t we read anymore?

They said the same thing about television 50+ years ago. And then video games and MTV 30 years ago. As far as I can tell people are doing just fine and books and reading continue along uninterrupted. People are as intelligent as they were a generation or two ago and are able to concentrate and solve problems just fine.

The "research" on how our brains are affected by media has historically been incredibly speculative and shoddy. Is it any different this time?

jayvanguardon Ask HN: How to keep yourself prepared for potential interviews?

Companies do this all the time in various forms. Recruiting and HR are entire departments at most companies.

Don't get confused and start acting like a corporation is a person with feelings.

jayvanguardon Google Dart Will Not Be the Next Default Programming Language of the Web

Any of the three of them can and have influenced the direction of Javascript incrementally throughs standards groups and implementing features that become de facto via popularity.

None of them can replace it with another language.

jayvanguardon Google Dart Will Not Be the Next Default Programming Language of the Web

It was never going to be. Any language claiming to be the new web language needs to convince Google, Apple, and Microsoft to all cooperate and put it in their browsers.

So any language created by just one of the three of them is dead in the water.

jayvanguardon Becoming Productive in Haskell

Completely agreed about quality. Popularity is highly correlated to actual utility though.

Lisp falls into the same category. High quality and very interesting but it will never, ever gain widespread use. Don't believe me? A half century of proof exists. Haskell is already at a quarter century.

Both are very cool and everyone should learn them to some degree because they will make you a better programmer but neither will ever be used widely. They just aren't appropriate for most general purpose programming tasks.

jayvanguardon Becoming Productive in Haskell

Anytime a technology needs to publish a list of "who's actually using this in the real world" the answer is not all that many (relative to other peer technologies). Most projects in those lists fall into the following categories:

1. It is just a small team or even one person using it and they're doing it because they really want to use that technology badly.

2. The project is some side research thing or trivially small that it could have been done using any technology.

3. It is actually just a tool or sub-system of the main system that was low risk enough.

4. The project is no longer operational, if it ever made it to that stage.

jayvanguardon Why we are leaving Dropbox

Same. Innovation is not what I want out of Dropbox. I want stability, speed, and continued bug fixes.

The one point I agree with him on though is that the web interface could use some work.

jayvanguardon Why do pub TVs have a pint glass in the corner?

I thought this article was a joke and the answer would be "because you're half passed out with your head on the table dumb-ass."

jayvanguardon C-51 will undermine Canada’s businesses: Open letter from 60 business leaders

The mind boggles that Harper is trying to push this through in the wake of the NSA scandal.

jayvanguardon Why the super-rich get richer

That was my thought as well. The dates don't quite line up. Computers weren't widespread until the mid to late 1970s when mini-computers started to show up in smaller businesses.

Even then, very small numbers of people were actually working with the computers and the paper office was still in full force. It wasn't until the 1980s that computers were ubiquitous in a way that it clearly affected the vast majority of the population.

jayvanguardon How Can I Be as Great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson?

Be lucky.

jayvanguardon Java Generics FAQs

Surely this is sarcastic?

jayvanguardon Ways Men in Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist (2014)

> Using “guys” to mean “people”

I do this accidentally all the time and really need to stop it.

jayvanguardon Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

This person seems extremely picky. I have pretty much every generation of kindle and they just keep getting incrementally better. Resolution, backlight, multiple dictionaries, x-ray, etc.

jayvanguardon Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

None of these are programming languages in the sense people normally use the term (with the exception of PL/1). They are propriety frameworks and tools. Even PL/1 was an IBM developed language.

Proprietary frameworks, products, and tools are definitely a terrible thing to base your career on. Languages such as C, C++, Java, Ruby, etc. are a good investment.

jayvanguardon Programmer Competency Matrix

You might like that to be true but it simply isn't. I'd suggest to "keep trying" but really that won't change the reality of how the term is used.

jayvanguardon Stevey's Google Platforms Rant (2011)

+1 Yegge's blog (heck, +10). I miss it.

What is actually so interesting about this post though is how wrong he was about distributed architecture and the micro-services approach.

Amazon, while their recruiting process may still have flaws, has created the future of computing by realizing the original vision of "The Network is the Computer." No other company has done this on such a scale with such success.

But yeah, more Yegge. Even when he was wrong he got people thinking and talking.

jayvanguardon Amazon Home Services

Drones are still going:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-groun...

Don't forget they started in books and now sell pretty much everything. Also, the kindle seemed to work out pretty well.

jayvanguardon On Secretly Terrible (Old) Engineers

This is a good point. It would be useful to have a lower skilled, named role for a lot of the rote programming jobs that just involve gluing frameworks together.

jayvanguardon How Many Mutual Funds Routinely Rout the Market? Zero

> And Mr Buffet's investment company has beaten wall street for decades.

The difference is that he has significant inside information into many of his investments. He deeply researches the companies involved, talks to their owners, etc. He is far smarter than your average investor but he also purchases companies with far more information than your average investor.

jayvanguardon Bidding farewell to Google Code

> On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

The current planet? Open source projects have a lifetime of years so five months is not that long in the scheme of things. People put there code on there and participated (providing Google content that they were able to use and drive traffic) with the expectation that it would be there for the long term.

jayvanguardon FAA says monetized videos shot from drones are subject to commercial regulations

Conservative axe-grinding.

jayvanguardon Flash Boys a Year Later

Technology is in no way democratized and you're dreaming if you think the most advanced trading is in the hands of consumers.