raganwald

9 ms·

1.
by raganwald 13y ago
Paul Graham wrote an essay called "Things You Can't Say." He should update it so I'll know what things I can't say on Hacker News, like "Let's discuss this idea like reasonable people without, heaping sham
2.
by raganwald 13y ago
I took this entirely as a conversation between developer and "stakeholder," be that client, employer, whomever, but not the end-user. I've built many such forms, and all of them have included traditional forms of address. I m
3.
by raganwald 13y ago
You may disagree, but it's not ridiculous. It's perfectly reasonable. In fact, by calling it ridiculous, you're sending a very strong signal that people who ask questions about whether we should keep doing this the way they&#
4.
by raganwald 13y ago
So does this mean you don't write any software that doesn't save lives? That you don't come onto Hacker News and make comments? For whatever reason you find yourself doing a task. Gardening, washing dishes, building a web for
5.
by raganwald 13y ago
Your entire comment seems to be based on the premise that either companies have a strong insider/outsider culture or they are soulless places to work. When in reality, there are many, many companies that have strong company cultures wi
6.
by raganwald 13y ago
Of course, correlation does not equal causation . If there is something about their "culture" that is off-putting to women, you can't "fix" it by changing the hiring practices. You fix the culture and the hiring pr
7.
Dropbox’s hiring practices explain its disappointing lack of female employees(washingtonpost.com)
19 points by raganwald 13y ago|13 comments
8.
by raganwald 13y ago
I do not speak for GitHub, but anonymous sources inform me that the feature only works with prose formats that have a built-in renderer. So basically, if you can preview the file, you can get a rendered diff for it. This seems to confirm yo
9.
by raganwald 13y ago
I don't know if this is true for CoffeeScript, but sometimes an unfamiliar syntax enables something new and very useful. You won't experience that unless you embrace something very different. eS6 will have fat arrows, but comparin
10.
by raganwald 13y ago
Even if he happened to be right about his contention, this isn't the point at all. The question here is, "Should a programming service be offered in a language other than English?" Whereas ESR is claiming, "Programmers s
11.
by raganwald 13y ago
They are mistaking the indicator for the thing indicated. This is one of the most important (and neglected) insights in business. People often optimize for the indicator at the expense of the thing it is supposed to indicate. Example: One
12.
by raganwald 13y ago
I agree, let's flip this around and think like customers. We go out to choose a vendor for some important service. Vendors A and B have roughly equal parity on features and services, but vendor A's employees eat their own dogfood
13.
by raganwald 13y ago
I also don't think being in over your head or having architectural issues is a crime - it's the default state for startups, especially ones trying to keep up with big growth. While this statement is usually true, let's not
14.
by raganwald 13y ago
A lot of the dynamics you're describing here on Hacker News also apply to Hacker News. It's the same problem: Surface quality content and don't allow the items on the front page to choke out new submissions just because they
15.
by raganwald 13y ago
Raganwald! Downvote or don't downvote! Why are you trying to shame akeri_!? Point, set and match.
16.
by raganwald 13y ago
Donate or don't donate, that's your call. But why are you complaining about him asking for a donation? Why try to "shame" him? What is he doing to harm you?
17.
by raganwald 13y ago
Or leave him hanged with his pockets stuffed with money as an old-testament warning. What the supreme being in "Time Bandits" described as "doing something extroverted and vengeful." http://en.wikipedia.org&#x
18.
by raganwald 13y ago
Mastering "engineering" in a language and maximizing your interview "performance" are loosely coupled at best. Also, leave the affiliate links in. Those who care to remove them know how to change the affiliate code to be
19.
by raganwald 13y ago
Exaggerated in one way, possibly under-reporting in another. What if athlete sexual activity follows a power law? A very small number of athletes might have hundreds of hookups during the games while most may have zero or one.
20.
by raganwald 13y ago
Exactly. But it doesn't degeneralize to "Everything is so different that rules of thumb are not useful guidelines," but rather that within a particular "genre" or "world," there are sensible defaults that
21.
by raganwald 13y ago
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You're a software developer. Me too. But we may not have the same
22.
by raganwald 13y ago
> Am I missing something? Yes. If you went to high school, you may recall a certain type of person: They'd pick someone else, anyone else, and make fun of them for no reason other than to elevate themselves as an arbiter of taste. &
23.
by raganwald 13y ago
The original word for that is "verisimilitude." I may be alone in this, but I consider "truthiness" to be something that you want to be true even though it's obviously not true. From where I'm sitting, Mayor
24.
by raganwald 13y ago
Mind you, the observation that "90% of the companies advertising for passionate programmers are crud" is uninformative about the nature of passion does not mean that Avdi's article was uninformative. It's highly useful t
25.
Sturgeon's Passionate Revelation(braythwayt.com)
14 points by raganwald 13y ago|8 comments
26.
by raganwald 13y ago
"hello" Not an object. new String("hello") Object. Along the way, autoboxing will convert a string to an object delegating to String.prototype if you write something like "hello".foobar(). Bu
27.
by raganwald 13y ago
It is correct to say that typeof(null) returns the string 'object' because of a bug that is now written into the standard to prevent old software from "breaking" if they fixed this. It is not ever correct to say that nul
28.
by raganwald 13y ago
Douglas Crockford on the history of this behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ifWcnQs6M#t=489
29.
by raganwald 13y ago
Paul Graham once said, "Where there's muck, there's brass." He explained that there is often an opportunity to be had if you dive deep down into ugly, unpleasant things and find a way to make them work.
30.
by raganwald 13y ago
Thank you, although please note that "JavaScript Spessore" is (a) a work-in-progress, and (b) about "Thinking in objects" more than "The idiomatic way to program in JavaScript.

More ›