kowen

5 ms·

1.
Ready, Aim, Fail(checklet.com)
2 points by kowen 16y ago|0 comments
2.
by kowen 16y ago
I've had some success playing with wordoid.com to come up with "name-ey" or "word-ey" names.
3.
by kowen 16y ago
7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names. My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Taiwan, not mainland China.
4.
by kowen 16y ago
I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting th
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by kowen 16y ago
I second (third?) this. You can also use a ViaJet (some people prefer it). You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation. If you add irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental f
6.
by kowen 16y ago
One discovery that kind of blew my mind a few months back was approvals. I've seen the entire bowling game kata done with a single test. It's a bit different to code against a failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small in
7.
by kowen 16y ago
This gets even more embarrassing if you're used to typing in dvorak. I can never remember the actual keys I use to perform certain actions - my fingers obviously know how, but my brain has no longer retained the actual mapping. And I can't
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by kowen 16y ago
> Just ask any man who has spent twenty minutes waiting for a woman to put on her face, only to find that she looks hardly different when she comes out from the bathroom than she did when she went in. > It makes evolutionary sens
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by kowen 16y ago
The speaker in the TED video didn't actually say that people weren't motivated by carrots in the tasks that required creative thought, just that carrots didn't improve performance in those situations.
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by kowen 16y ago
The female engineers I know seem to approach "everything as a problem to be solved" too.
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by kowen 16y ago
Interesting! I wonder if people know this instinctively, or we just sort of pattern match in the background and pick up on it.
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by kowen 16y ago
Yes, "why" would be extremely interesting! It would appear that the research on the subject is somewhat spotty and often gets misinterpreted, sometimes at the source. I found a book on amazon the other day called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by
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by kowen 16y ago
Somewhat arbitrarily this brings LOLCODE to mind. http://lolcode.com/examples/hai-world
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by kowen 16y ago
Have you tried the readability bookmarklet? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970
15.
Why Silicon Valley is Not Where You Should Launch Your Next Startup(loopshot.com)
3 points by kowen 16y ago|1 comments
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by kowen 17y ago
Ah, right! Rereading the thread, that seems the more likely interpretation.
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by kowen 17y ago
It's hardly a placebo effect if it has an effect for a few hours. I've struggled with insomnia my whole life. If I'm able to fall asleep in the first place, I'm usually able to stay asleep long enough to get rested. I only need the effect f
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Locking Legacy Code with ApprovalsTests [video](youtube.com)
1 points by kowen 17y ago|0 comments
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by kowen 17y ago
Actually, if what he says is true (and I'm reading it correctly), then the Fed can print lots of money, lend it to the US Government so that they can pay off the national debt... but then the US Government owes the Fed, and we're kind of ri
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by kowen 17y ago
I've found that pair programming for a bit can help me get past that initial resistance. It doesn't have to be anything special or official - just a shared screen with a friend over skype can be enough to get going.
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by kowen 17y ago
> only doing say 2 hours work a day Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and nego
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by kowen 17y ago
For those interested in this subject, I would suggest looking into ROWE - Results-Only Work Environment. http://gorowe.com/ The basic tenet of ROWE is to stop doing busy-work, and start doing only what matters. Stop wasting everyone's tim
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by kowen 17y ago
I once was asked to help a designer make her own webpage. She made everything circular... and the menu rotated. sigh
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by kowen 17y ago
A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time looking at job boards and craigslist, and the experience was not a delightful one. Finally I found a company that hadn't posted any listings but that I really liked, and just knocked on their door
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by kowen 17y ago
If I were given a chance to do it over, I think I'd beg to be allowed to unschool for k-12, and then go to university. University was where it started getting relevant/interesting (to me, anyway). I'm not knocking education in itself, just.
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by kowen 17y ago
Excellent question, and thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to look into it!
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by kowen 17y ago
I'm not railing against profit in itself, I just find that sabotaging a good solution that would profit many people (but not you in the short term) is illogical.
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by kowen 17y ago
I think CSS itself isn't so complicated, but the whole different support in different browsers thing certainly does make a mess of it! One of the most helpful things I ever did with respect to CSS was read the apress book on html/css patter
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by kowen 17y ago
It seems to me that we have the resources and technology to solve a lot of problems for good, but a permanent (or even just "better") solution would get in the way of profit. (I saw the documentary "who killed the electric car" recently, wh
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by kowen 17y ago
> Refactoring doubly so :-) Oh, man, the truth hurts! I would much rather refactor than go out and sell. There is such a zen to refactoring. It doesn't require intense problem-solving thought, but it isn't mindless. More, hm... mindfu

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