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sauravc

186 karma · joined July 16, 2008

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sauravc··on High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
I thought this was a well written article and I loved the graphics (especially the one about 30 minute meetings actually taking 68 minutes). However, it's worth noting that this company is fairly small (48 members according to their About page) and that the group has been together for quite some time.

I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.

Either way, I'm glad they published this.

sauravc··on 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
Bill Gates never said "640k ought to be enough for anybody."

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syst...

sauravc··on The new Google Contacts
About time!
sauravc··on Immigration to increase the supply of programmers
"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing,"

What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.

sauravc··on Nearables: Why a global lost-and-found network is finally viable
Isn't this basically Tile? https://www.thetileapp.com/
sauravc··on Recipe for a Better Oven
His article takes aim at these high-end ovens as well, and makes several proposals to make them even better.
sauravc··on Recipe for a Better Oven
I beg to differ. A better oven means tastier food at home, which pays dividends every single day of your life.
sauravc··on Recipe for a Better Oven
We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.

After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.

sauravc··on Bill Gates takes part in Reddit's Secret Santa
Going from a simple millionaire to creating a company like Microsoft takes a lot of hard work to pull off.

But if you want to run with your line of reasoning then no one in the US really qualifies as self-made, from the point of view of let's say a poor person in India. We're all rich to someone who makes less than a dollar a day.

sauravc··on Bill Gates: My Plan to Improve Our World, and How You Can Help
Apple hit with U.S. injunction in e-books antitrust case http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/06/us-apple-ebooks-id...
sauravc··on Bill Gates’ nuclear company explores molten salt reactors, thorium
I hate what I know about Intellectual Ventures. But I love Nathan's cook book (http://modernistcuisine.com/) . I may not like what he does with IV, but it's hard to deny the dude's a genius.
sauravc··on ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services
@augustl: We manage connections with curl and requests(python). We haven't seen any bottlenecks here yet, so we haven't thought to revisit it.

We do, however, use ZeroMQ for other stuff. But I'll always reach for HTTP for an API, unless there's a need to do otherwise. It's super simple to get running, interface and debug with. Every backend engineer knows how to use curl.

sauravc··on ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services
HTTP works fine for me. Seems like a nice article though.
sauravc··on Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies?
Why would the average user want to see that warning before every movie? It's a waste of time for most people.

If one is such a nitpicker, Netflix isn't a good fit. Pay for the BluRay director's cut. Netflix $7.99/month, and it's a pretty good deal for what they provide.

sauravc··on Refactoring GitHub's Design
"And at the same time, we can de-emphasize the branch switcher since it’s so rarely used."

WRONG. This is why designers shouldn't be "redesigning" stuff they don't use.

Branching and merging with ease is what makes distributed scm's so much better than the previous generation. Why would one want to de-emphasize this?

And let's talk about what really used. Github is great for viewing code easily and making comments. So what did they do to the code view div in the latest redesign? They made it smaller! Unbelievable!

So now I have to use a Chrome plugin to fix it: https://github.com/sauravc/github_wideload

These "designers" aren't entirely to blame though. A lot of what the author suggested makes things better. Unfortunately, coders are a tough crowd to please.

sauravc··on How to properly plagiarize a website
Sure. But I've seen these design elements all over the web before. Infininum is just as guilty as Kintek when it comes to copying.
sauravc··on Maybe buses should be free
Live in downtown Seattle here. Although I enjoyed not paying for bus rides while it was free, I'm much happier with the service now that payment is required.

As a side note, the wait time for paying was reduced drastically once the Orca Card system (rfid based bus pass) went into use. From my experience, with the Orca Card the wait times for paying aren't that much longer compared to the free bus method. It's only when a group of tourists get on the bus and pay with coins is it noticeable.

sauravc··on Repository Next
My team's inherited code (legacy code) where not all lines are trimmed to 80 or even 120 chars. Long file names or deeply nested directories aren't something I run into currently, but I recall running into them on several J2EE apps in the past.
sauravc··on Repository Next
It looks like the code viewing area was narrowed. If the redesign was meant to put more focus on content, this decision is perplexing.

I wish they'd make a responsive design that would make use of my 24" monitor. Right now I've resorted to writing a Chrome plugin to widen the code viewing area via CSS.

http://github.com/sauravc/github_wideload

sauravc··on The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
I don't think was that easy to do all this virtualization stuff back in 2003. And even if it was, why would he invest resources to do this when the artists were willing to pay him?
sauravc··on What is Microsoft smoking?
What landed them in Federal Court was bundling a browser (the most advanced at the time) with their OS for free. Over a decade later, we all know that a consumer OS that ships without a browser is an incomplete product (as BillG testified in the case).

What Apple is doing now with dictatorial actions in its app stores is just as, if not more, overreaching IMHO. Does that make it OK? No.

But keep in mind why people were actually interested in what MS had to offer back then. Just as we still buy Apple products despite their anti-competitive behavior, people bought MSFT products in the largely because the product addressed their needs better than others and the price was right.

sauravc··on German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
Is this the only news outlet with this story? How credible is this publication? Before I get worked up about this story, I'd like to know it's not bullshit.
sauravc··on Does Pinterest own the word “pin”?
Question for a lawyer: Isn't Pinterest required to send these letters out or risk trademark erosion? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark#Trademark...)
sauravc··on Why Awk for AI? (1997)
Seems pretty easy in python:

  from subprocess import call
  call(["ls", "-l"])
or

  import os
  os.system("ls -l")
sauravc··on When empathy becomes insulting
"There’s simply nothing worse than someone telling you how sorry they are when you can hear they don’t give a damn."

-- actually there is... they could easily be a jackass about it and tell you to screw off. First World Problems... smh

sauravc··on Nobody ever got fired for buying a cluster
Specifically this image:

http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg?...

sauravc··on Nobody ever got fired for buying a cluster
Reminds of this article: http://blog.wavii.com/2011/12/29/your-mileage-may-vary/
sauravc··on Nobody ever got fired for buying a cluster
Didn't notice anything. You got a good eye.
sauravc··on Illustrating the Ubuntu clown car, AccountsService edition (2012)
This is from August of last year. Is it still relevant?
sauravc··on The magic of HTML5 and S3
No "magic" here. They're just paying Amazon to host their content instead of hosting it themselves.
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