reeses

Where is this "use" part of which you speak?

Aggressive JIT languages are historically slow at startup. The typical tradeoff (similar to the server/client Java VM flags) is to amortize the optimizations over the length of the application if startup time is a factor.

If you start Julia (or Mathematica, Excel, or whatever) up every time you need to 'graphically explore data', you're doing it wrong. Unless you fubar your environment (not that I ever do this on a regular basis), there isn't a great reason to restart your exploratory environment.

I got a very strange text message purporting to be from Yahoo!. I ignored it, thinking that, at the very least, it was an attempt to grab logins during some DNS poisoning attack.

One thing that human marketers did for us was to establish a plan for tradeshows, publications, advertisements, and ultimately launches.

My cofounder and I had tension related to whether we should continue to polish or whether we should shove the fledgling application out into the wild. The marketers helped balance that with a roadmap based on trade shows and purchasing scenarios.

It is of course helpful when the marketing firm is very well connected, but we would not have had any concerns if we had one marketing expert with technical leverage.

We decided to view it from the opposite direction. 'Bench' time means lab bench, which works well as most of our actual employees[1] are grad students and postdocs. We support their research and have a publication policy that puts their dissertation work first.

When we have interesting RFPs from consulting clients, then we pull people away from the bench.

It's a great way to retain people, have flexibility in the projects we take, and have significant depth and breadth for a small firm.

[1] we also very heavily draw from a pool of highly trusted subcontractors, many of whom are former employees. Because of our experiences with them, we go to them first and they all give us first crack at their availability.

"Conventional" boolean operators work as well. Again, I suspect that it depends on whether a developer has mapped something ToExpression can consume, either via forms, boxes, or unlocking the function itself. (This would be consistent with the "throw more mud at it" comment.)

As a Mathematica and WApro user, I find most of the utility in not having to import random datasets myself. As every researcher, I have a disgusting library of scripts that often involve curl, groovy, awk, sed, etc., to pull info into mma. It's nice when that becomes SEP[1].

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+%28x+%E2%88%A8+y%29+%E...

[1] Someone Else's Problem

We have a challenge in that so many of our web applications are built in a way that prevents us from performing analysis across technologies. For example, a modern rails app will possibly include haml, sass, coffeescript, and ruby along with the usual html, Javascript, css, etc., that are included in the various gems and plugins.

There are a lot of ways to skin this poor cat, but at this time they are generally manual and therefore unused. As a result, we try to solve dead code problems as if it is an entirely new challenge.

Dynamic code, and especially code with insufficient test coverage, poses a particular challenge, but again, it is generally possible to instrument code to see if it is ever called by the application.

After "you have no job," all they want to hear is dates, severance, and benefits. Anything else is just wasting everyone's time, because they are in their own heads and not listening.

You don't want to live half your life as an over-60 geriatric, with daily pains, vocational ostracisation, inadequate income, and decreasing social relevance?

Mind you, some would bin that in with the douchey "I wouldn't want to live if I became paraplegic/deaf/blind," but I do fear that, given how crappy it is to be 75 today, it's not going to be senior Disneyland by the time I'm old. Older.

Put my brain in a jar and I might have a different perspective, but I've seen enough family members admit they're just tired and want to go when their time comes.

Every conformant non-toy Common Lisp implementation?

This is another of those "people did it 100 years ago and now we have to reinvent it" things. The Mark I would never have had this problem.

I'm about to tar up their folder on Dropbox, so you might want to avoid that for a bit as well. :-)

I terminated a relationship with a consulting client right before the outage and thought,"How the hell did they manage that?"

Then I realized I probably broke Google by dragging their folder from clients to clients/retired.

Sorry about that.

Interestingly, many of the 'alternative' layouts don't have the same advantages on the phone.[1] For example, any of the layouts that emphasize home row locality, such as the * aks, don't really help when you're typing with two thumbs. The Sholes "slow you down just enough to avoid a physical constraint" method turns out to be useful when you have two digits flopping around with the potential of being in each other's way.

Also, you can change the default keyboard at the application level[2], but this leads to annoying "edit here, copy, paste there" workflow solutions. You can also change it at the system level if you have a phone that can be jailbroken.

A particularly awesome example of alternative keyboard implementations on iOS is Hipjot[3], which affords two-finger swype-style typing. The developer demonstrates 120wpm touch-typing on his phone[4] and advertises 70-90wpm on the Hipjot app store page.

[1] Pretend I acknowledged the iPad.

[2] Fleksy includes an SDK option. http://fleksy.com

[3] http://jormy.com/hipjot/

[4] http://www.macrumors.com/2014/01/11/new-ios-swiping-keyboard...

Hah, I was caught out repeating myself. :) I remember kvetching on that c2 page early this century.

In general, macros, templates, and patterns are an "almost" discovery that a user needs a language (task, whatever) to have another level of abstraction or factorization for the activity at hand.

For example, the visitor pattern is easily eliminated by dispatching on multiple arguments or with a monad.

The template provides that common, low-level, way of communicating to other developers in that the resulting code is consistently formatted and is native java/c/etc.. It's a pain in the ass to deal with constructs such as conventional iterative loops, exception handling boilerplate, braces/whitespace/etc., or massively redundant structures such as XML, as a regular programmer.

My favorite example of a level of 'retardation' in a language is pattern matching.

I can either write a painful if/then/else/else/else/else/else/default/end tree or I can write something like the following.

f(0) → 0. f(1) → 1. f(<binary:01001001010101011101010><x as binary>) → x as number. f(x > 10) → 1.

Of course, this can be expressed in a number of ways. Table? Spreadsheet? Domain mapping with pretty lines?

I think we're losing information on a lot of the footpaths we should be paving by not having feedback into the use of various macros, templates, and patterns in the world.

"Automatic MDI/MDI-X Configuration is intended to eliminate the need for crossover cables between simi-lar devices. Implementation of an automatic MDI/MDI-X configuration is optional for 1000BASE-T devices. The assignment of pin-outs for a 1000BASE-T crossover function cable is shown in Table 40-12 in 40.8."

Here's a link that does not require IEEEXplore access: http://www.scribd.com/doc/46141801/802-3ab-1999

They all do now, but it's still an optional element of the standard.

Anyone who has maintained Makefiles will have a strong opinion on semantic whitespace.

Maybe not opinion, but reaction. Generally involving visceral fear or anger.

It's not that it's always bad, every hour of every day. It's that one time, at 1am, when you shouldn't be working but you are, something doesn't behave properly, and it turns out Bob the Intern re-indented a block of code to use tabs instead of spaces[1], but you couldn't see it because your editor is configured to use four spaces per tab and your coding standards dictate four spaces per level of scope.

[1] Why are you using spaces anyway, you complete and utter savage?

Actually, the author is rather well informed on the history and construction of stringed instruments. He simplified his loosely related analogy so he wouldn't have to write huge footnotes of apologia and exceptions in his mapping between domains.

In general, attacking the perceived inapplicability of an analogy is weak sauce. In this case, you allowed your pedantry to lead you to completely miss the point the author was making, both in his analogy and his thesis.

Your cofounder should be like your life partner in this situation. You should not have let it get to this point without knowing what was going on. Fix it now by leveraging your friendship to see how you can balance things out.

If nothing else, show that your priority is to the friend. If it turns out his priority is not the same, well, lots of couples break up because one wanted kids and the other did not.

If you're paying H1s less than locals you're violating immigration law. The idea behind the H1 program is to help you when you cannot find local expertise in your specialty and need to recruit globally. It's a very sensitive issue in the USA if you are bringing in less expensive foreigners to "steal" jobs from locals.

That said, it's prone to abuse and I have seen some H1s with really poor compensation due to a weak negotiating position (the difficulty of switching jobs while in-country, sponsored adjustment of status, etc.).

Depending on your service provider (hosting, msp, mttos, whatever), the up-front msa can be truly painful if you want "real" service. I.e., redundant power and multi-provider network connectivity with multiple connectivity points that have a massive capital cost but will be as reliable as your commercial or home utilities.

Couple the cost of establishing the relationship (especially with startup credit) with the NRC and MRC of hosting services, smart hands rates, reserved cabinet or cage space for those surprise boxes on the dock, and incremental pricing models, and it's very difficult to build out and manage poorly predicted growth in a financially constrained environment.

Saving money on this means you're allocating additional engineer hours to dealing with this yourself.

The 'middle road' is probably an operator in a decent NAP or superNAP that manages the big lease and then carves out a margin by offering smaller space, possibly even colocating your hardware in the same rack as someone else's (and maybe not in the same rack with your other gear), and charging more than a macminicolo but offering significantly improved and variable services.

There are a number of walls you can hit that will present themselves as an almost insurmountable obstacle when you own your own gear. There are mandatory professional services when setting up some gear (SAN vendors have been notorious for this) and it's just a bunch of attention you have to devote to something for which there is generally a good enough solution for a company that may not exist long enough to depreciate the servers that ate a huge amount of their startup capital.

It's not that we're 'afraid' of computers. It's like saying we were afraid of electricity or telephone lines 40 years ago. We can manage it, but it's almost irresponsible and risky to do so.

This is the worst idea ever but it explains a lot. I had not heard this before, and it's enough to make me hedge my bets and start trying to export notes into mmd files in nested directories (which one cannot do at present with stacks) and use Mavericks tagging.

I would definitely call this an anti-pattern for cross-platform software.

Sometimes you'll get hosed because of the attachment upload limit, which does not degrade gracefully. Originally, it just logged that you couldn't sync. When they did add a notification, it was something along the line of "sux2bu [ok]".

I know the Mac App Store and download versions are different (never install the MAS version, just add the download version to your puppet setup.). As the Windows and iOS versions are obviously different as well, I have this feeling there's a bunch of #ifdef hell in their builds that doesn't get tested well before releases.

Unfortunately, you're not paying enough for your complaints to matter. Evernote has made it fairly clear that they believe the software is adequate at this point and have been seeking growth through partnerships with other 'organizational' tools such as scanners (with a neutered version of the lovely ScanSnap) and post-it notes with magic colors.

I have this weird spread between org-mode and Evernote, mainly because Evernote is usable on my phone.

That's not helpful. I'll summarize that page.

From: How to Plan your Wedding...without going insane

1. Sign up for WorkFlowy 2. Create a project list and 'zoom in.' 3. Create sections for the major components of your project 4. Fill out the details 5. Use #tags and @tags to filter your lists 6. Share your list with your collaborators 7. Mark things as complete as you finish them. 8. Complete your project

They have anointed evangelists who do more to drive people away from the forum than offer any real help.

Every company is stack ranking and every good manager (and many bad ones) have their teams ranked in the event that they need to cut or have the opportunity to improve the team through training, promotion, etc. ("What would you do if I gave you four open positions?")

You have that guy who you're putting on plan because he's late with his deliverables, doesn't really 'get' the purpose of the department/group/company, and kvetches all the time about one thing or another? You've ranked him.

That woman you're trying to mentor as much as possible so you can promote her, maybe even to your peer level? Ranked.

There are people who are essential to an organization at different times. Keeping the lights on? I've cut everything but devops and maintenance, including myself. Sometimes you can save someone, but you can't transfer a problem.

This is pretty common in the growth phase of a company, especially one with easily scalable demand such as a software company.

As others have pointed out, a lot of projects have been built from 'scratch' due to Twitter's needs and/or culture. This alone has a heavy carrying cost, as they now have the burden of having at least two maintainers for mission critical applications and services. It doesn't mean the engineer-tuples are bijective onto the various projects, but there are only so many tickets a person can resolve.

At Amazon, we grew to what we then thought was an insane size in IT (and across the company – we had horrid little offices all over the place in Seattle). This was boosted by a number of acquisitions, such as drugstore.com and homegrocer.com. In 2000, we had a small round of layoffs, then they had another round in 2001.

I would expect something similar at Twitter if they don't move horizontally. I would say that, given the competitive HR landscape, it's quite possible they intentionally overhired to secure strong engineers and will rank and yank those who have not turned out to be performers.

They're still in an annealing phase, but, honestly, I'm unqualified to speculate on their internal alignment, growth plans, or any RIFs they have planned in the near future.

"ensuring 100% uptime" without an asterisk pointing to a 300-page list of exceptions is obviously hiding it deep in the T&Cs when signing up.

The amusing part is that this sort of assurance has exactly the value you mentioned. You may be running your $20m business on this $50 service (Elvis help you), but if you're down for a month, the maximum you're going to get back is $50, and very likely only in the form of a service credit.

I'm not sure if you looked at the other pages, because OMFG WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE GODADDY STYLE IMAGERY, but you'll note they're using EMC "Clarion" SAN devices.