jimfl

Indeed few boats that size are as maneuverable as a tug. It's a good metaphor for a skilled developer: even with that kind of agility, it can take a while to change the direction of something with a huge momentum. And a software project has momentum vectors shooting off in high dimensional space.

This reads like it was written by an exploratory text generator. For example, at the end of one of the paragraphs we find the sentence "Is happy to read the whole file."

  Check, check, and check.

Amazon also takes Visa and MasterCard.

"I figure if I was a millionaire, I could hook that up."

The deal is that 4chan is influencing the mode of discourse on the web. For what that's worth.

Working backwards from the customer isn't necessarily giving the customer what they're asking you for, but defining a product which will, in fact make something easier, more fun, or scratch an itch to the extent that they will give you money and convince their friends to do the same.

What frightens me even more than Luke taking the edge routers to Anchorhead, is this phrase: "When we received alerts and reports from customers, our operations team began to check our infrastructure." which suggests that they didn't have monitoring in place that could detect and alert on even such a coarse-grained event.

I worked for a Silver Lake owned company, surviving multiple quarterly layoffs, and 3 CEOs. The only metric for these companies is EBITA, and dropping people helps maintain that number. The PE firm is making money all the while the actual company is hemorrhaging.

You have. The other side of the story is that there is no story.

A number is the sum of its digits, raised to the appropriate powers

    Sum(i=0..n, a[i]*10^i)

123, for example is 3 + 2 * 10 + 1 * 100.

A power of 10 (10^n) can be re written as

    (1 + 9 * Sum(i=0..n-1, 10^i). 

For example: 1000 = 1 + 999 = 1 + 900 + 90 + 9

When you subtract two numbers with the same digits, you end up being able to factor a nine out of these sums fairly easily.

I wrote a proof of the number - reverse(number) a while back. It can be found on archive.org

http://web.archive.org/web/20050314023901/http://jimfl.tense...

Any number subtracted from a re-arrangement of the digits results in a multiple of 9.

"In the future, the scientists plan to investigate the possibility that quantum space has three dimensions of space, as Sorli explained."

I LOL'd.

Oh, thank goodness. Just yesterday I tried to deploy 6 different apps from the IIS app gallery, with 0 successful deploys. I thought maybe I was starting to go retarded.

Apparently there are some bugs which prevent parameterized deploys from working properly. Also, the documentation for Microsoft.Web.Deployment is very poor.

The half life of most software is 18 months or less (the number of users decreases by half), so you can be way sloppier in it's construction.

The BBSs of the 80s had the concept of the Twit Bit, which, if set for a user, they were the only ones who would see their posts. It was if everyone else were simply ignoring their posts.

Even better, logs are databases, and not a linear sequence at all. Often, I find that I am interested in some very specific subset of what happened; between these dates, from this IP address, in this module, errors of this kind, etc. If log entries were put in a database with a well-thought out schema, using the log in this way would be trivial.

There is no such thing as bad press.

Not having a phone is extremism? That's rich! It is, however, a common attitude. The fact that I don't have a phone is generally met with incredulity.

Sometimes I like to trick co-workers by connecting to my VoIP phone with a SIP client on my laptop and calling from my desk extension. "You're still at work!?"

I mostly notice not having a phone when I meet people after work for cocktails, because I arrive on time, and sit alone in the venue, getting a head start.

There is a band of the economic spectrum in which entrepreneurialism can be practiced at the scale and with the low barriers to entry we currently enjoy, and so macro economic news can be hacker news.

Also, many successful startups simply engage in making distractions for the middle class, so that they pay less attention to the rising temperature of the water in the pot.

I am a .NET developer, and I am trying to hire excellent, well-rounded .NET developers (hint), and I can tell you that it is non-trivial, specifically because many .NET developers are not particularly well-rounded, nor have the vast majority of them much experience outside the .NET ecosystem, nor more than a basic understanding of the technologies which underly the very powerful abstractions MS has built on top of them.

So I can certainly sympathize that someone who is building something that requires more fundamental knowledge might find .NET to be an effective bunny-filter.

I did stop reading the article when I got to "I'm sure .NET is a dandy language."

You can't do whatever you want with a device that is connected to a cellular network of any sort.

"Hey, Jules, which one of these commits is yours?"

"Mine's the one that says 'Bad Motherfucker' on it."

Be sure it is worth it.

Smart developers can smell an arbitrary deadline a mile away. The need for extra effort need to be tied to something more tangible than the Gregorian calendar and/or an executive's bonus.

Stimulate a culture of ownership.

Interest your developers in the competition. Your competition are fools and trolls. Certainly we can do better. Regularly checkpoint against the competition.

Consider developer-suggested features. Developers will put in the extra effort if they are playing out their own ideas, and are motivating each other.

Consider the following scenarios: Manager: "I need you to work this weekend to get xyz done by mmddyy."

Or, Developer: "Dude, I am going to hackathon on xyz at the coffeehouse on Saturday. Caffeinated mints are on me."

And if you insist upon making anonymous or pseudonymous comments, you're a troll.

A good engineering team will design with various simultaneous failure modes in mind. I've never ever seen this mindset on the business side.

The correlation, however tenuous, that I arrived at is the abiding interest in the hacker community to find a fitness regimen that interferes the least with the 16-hour workday.

Fascinating. I read the whole thing. Then I flagged it.

I have published a library, but no apps.

"Apple didn't invent the tablet..."

Completely disagree. All previous attempts have been nothing more than laptops with the keyboard torn off, and a stylus sensitive screen.

You can actually watch Apple invent the tablet right before our eyes with the iPod touch, iPhone, unibody MacBooks, and glossy displays.

Actually, it is called pedantry.