queensnake

The best I've ever heard comes from Agile - take the time to break the whole thing down into the finest detail you can tolerate (yes, you're doing part of the work this way), and /then/ estimate it. You'll still be wrong, but you'll be closer than if you hadn't done that.

Wow, you give me hope I could land a job in Europe!

No .... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoBwR9KEGUc&feature=plcp

Source:

http://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/zqu3o/trailer_of_t...

I keep pimping this link but for you it's perfect - http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks

It's several pages written over time but, it's the deepest thinking about the neuropsychology of programming I've seen. From stress, stress addiction, to the level of light (low is best). Some reading, but for someone writing a book you pretty much (imo) have to read it.

The most in-depth explanation (of programming productivity + physiology) is at The Programmer's Stone - warning, it's quite long. http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/

Indeed; why doesn't it have Reddit's ability to collapse whole threads?

He mentions around 0:36 how he picks things to review in the check-ins - it sure would be nice to see a "John Carmack's Style Guide".

? It's been that way for a long time. It's to discourage joke jobs.

Offtopic and down-votable but, I haven't seen anyone as fat as the guy on the left since moving to the west coast. How nice.

> I've noticed that in general foreigners have a much better grammar than English native speakers

I have to disagree strongly - not my experience at all, with Indians, Chinese, Germans, Spaniards, Belorussians.. One exception, a Greek who could kick my verbal ass. But, of course, native speakers have the huge advantage of proper use being just intuitive but, still, you made an absolute statement.

You may be interested to know that when a conquered people adopts the conquerors' language, they take on the vocabulary but much of the grammar of the old language remains. I read an interesting paper about some grammatical trick you could do in Germanic languages, but not in English. Why? Maybe because, in this way, Celtic was shining through? No, non-British-aisles Celtic has the same trick. The paper speculated that it was a remnant of the grammar of pre-Celtic, pre-historic Briton. (Just to illustrate how hard it is to adopt a new grammar.)

Also, note, general foreigner, it's 'much better grammar' not '/a/ much better grammar'.

enh - so ask puzzle problems. Microsoft and Google have it covered. IMO.

That kind of defeats the purpose of the requirement I'd think.

> I think the walled garden approach is never really long-term sustainable.

You don't think so, because ... ?

Well it's lo-tech, and no visualization, but, I use a wiki. It allows you to markup, pull out concepts and facts and easily linkify everything. Better than plain text at least.

This (my) comment is just noise, but I support the choice of short keywords - it helps in seeing them iconically. It's not the typing, though I think that helps too, but the reading - a long word, you have to /read/. A short sequence of chars is an instantly, right-brain recognized pattern. For that same reason I much prefer '0' to 'NULL' for ptrs in C/C++ to (I'm talking about visually, not type safety).

So what's your solution? Crack the whip and yell 'You /can/ learn! You /will/ be a creative knowledge worker!'? Inject everyone with nanites or genemods to make it so? Or dump them in their own restricted area and let them subsistence farm or fight it out?

And among the unemployed /now/, do you see this happening?

Down, and no Google cache.

One place I worked had an explicit 30% dev time for internal improvement. It wasn't Agile, but cleanup work did supposedly get scheduled.

(add -Werror - your students will never know.)

Just say what it is and let the reader decide how important it is. I say something like, Machine Learning 2011 (ml-class.org; free, online, no-credit Stanford course). Though personally, if I haven't even begun a class I wouldn't mention it - what is an employer to do with that info? Perhaps you'd get a plus for taking classes but...

feedshow? It's free, but, somewhat slow to update.

Yeah there aren't many stories about the first self-aware robots. Robopocalypse and Short-Circuit but, to me it's surprisingly un-explored. Maybe because it's hard.

Take it a step further - whether people data-mine and generalize the human motions and expressions or, just cleverly used fixed 'patches' of behavior, well, imagine now using them in live robots. /That/ will be an Uncanny Valley :)

That's a good theory except, that you wouldn't want a creature with self-respect etc being treated as merchanise; she says she'll comply but, at least in humans, that resolution wouldn't last forever. No, I vote for the demo being incoherent, "enh, get it done, it's just a demo".

But, they say the demo was made a year ago and that they've made much progress since - why not incorporate the new stuff? Grrr.

I think those are updated 'eventually', to cope with the scale. I've noticed the same thing.

It's even easier. I was carrying a metal external hard drive, put it through the belt with no problem. You could easily take out the HD and put some explosives in there instead.

edit Also, if combining fluids really is a threat, they're allowing liquid medicine bottles, now. It really /is/ theater.

Like a couple of things that smart people have said - our rate of innovation has dropped off, and, all the smartest workers are trying to maximize advertising effectiveness (well that and finance). Computers - a blessing and a curse.

For other dull-eyed clickers, the video lectures are on the left.

> Remember, if you have to ask if something is relevant in your resume, you should leave it off!

I did this once, and the interviewer asked me about all the holes (by date) in my resume. So, never again.