ryansloan

5 ms·

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by ryansloan 10y ago
I learned recently that this is similar to what happened in Canada - it started with one province (I can't remember which) and spread from there.
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by ryansloan 10y ago
I look forward to the inevitable postmortems/analysis of this process after the election is over. Some interesting research and writing came out of both of Obama's campaigns. It's interesting to me that this article focuses o
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by ryansloan 11y ago
We were just talking about this at the office this week and came to a similar conclusion. However, someone pointed out later that you could have a valid Secret Santa configuration that was not a Hamiltonian Path - you could have two (non-ov
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Predicting the Future: Schedules, Simulations, and Software(ryanjsloan.com)
1 points by ryansloan 12y ago|0 comments
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by ryansloan 12y ago
Warning: Anecdata follows... When I was a student, I had some great teachers who were tenured and some great teachers who were non-tenured. However, nearly all my awful teachers did have tenure. A lot of the people I know were in a simila
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by ryansloan 14y ago
Interestingly, I found this kind of hard to read. I think there's just too much leading in the body text - I could feel my eye moving as I was reading. Decreasing the line height to 1.25em felt better to me.
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by ryansloan 14y ago
Agreed. It happens a lot (in all my previous jobs I had mostly non-technical people as leads), but they have to work 10x harder to be effective. I think that even a limited technical background does a lot of things for you: 1) You can scope
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by ryansloan 15y ago
When I was a college student I worked on the other end of this: a faculty member and I were technical consultants for the University as they were evaluating some software systems. Let me just say: colleges can be a pain in the neck. There i
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by ryansloan 15y ago
Good question. I'd imagine that's part of the logic behind giving you "complete control" :) I'm also interested to see how they associate old photos and other pre-Facebook content with dates.
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by ryansloan 15y ago
Looks like a digital, semi-automated scrapbook. From my understanding, it's not an overhaul of the profile, but another view of your online identity. If they pull it off it could be pretty cool.
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by ryansloan 15y ago
I have to say, I think they blew it with this one. Spinning DVD-by-mail off into a separate business might make sense, but I just don't get splitting the ratings/suggestions up by not integrating the services. Considering that one of Netfli
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by ryansloan 16y ago
My father (who has always been self-employed) once said "the best thing about being self-employed is that I can choose my own hours. I can work whatever 100 hours a week I want."
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by ryansloan 16y ago
I usually change mine to "Sent from my mobile" or "Sent from (xxx) xxx-xxxx" I keep a line like this for two reasons, one of which is proofreading related, but the more important is to let them know that the reason for my terse reply is n
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by ryansloan 16y ago
I always say Management is taking out the trash.
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by ryansloan 16y ago
It's funny you would say that. In my Intro to Software Engineering class my team basically built this (location-based restroom finder with ratings etc.) George Constanza was my inspiration haha. We called it "Poopt" though.
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by ryansloan 16y ago
I think "tips" is one of the neatest features of Foursquare, and I see this as the same concept only the information comes to you. When I am in a new city I'll sometimes pull up Foursquare to look for a place to eat/drink/be merry and I rea
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by ryansloan 16y ago
But will you have to buy a full pallet of them from the aisle next to the socks?
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I have a close friend who studied Economics. He always said he wasn't cheap, just "opportunity cost aware."
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I definitely agree. Introducing the material isn't enough, there have to be quality educators who are also knowledgeable of computing. You mentioned hobbyists and professionals and I think this is a fantastic idea. Actually, Georgia Tech's
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I think this is really , really important. We start teaching students the foundations of chemistry, physics, and various areas of mathematics as early as Sixth grade, but Computer Science is largely ignored. Hell, it's hard enough to fin
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by ryansloan 17y ago
This seems like a good candidate for http://sadtrombone.com
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I think before you can convince students of this, you need to convince prospective employers. To a lot of them, GPA is an easy filter.
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I think you're both probably right. It's a habit I've wanted to break, but I just haven't gotten around to it. ;) In all seriousness, I think it probably -is- wise to eliminate the procrastination before I go from "intern extraordinaire" to
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by ryansloan 17y ago
Looks interesting. I'll bookmark it to read later. I can relate, especially to the bit where he says "I can only seem to accomplish anything when I have far too much to do, for the simple reason that I have no shortage of projects to work o
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I think 220 Billion is a highly inaccurate number as well, but I'm not sure if I agree with his assessment of the Y2K stuff. Granted, it -was- overhyped (stock up on batteries, rice, haz mat suits, etc.) but there would have been fairly sig
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I think it's a combination of factors. The obvious factor is that there is no COBOL content there. These communities tend to be focused on new and developing technologies, which aren't really relevant to their work most of the time. I think
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I worked as a COBOL programmer for two years (well, technically I did 2 summer internships and two short winter stints) so I have a little insight into the "community." I worked at a (successful) company that develops banking software and p
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by ryansloan 17y ago
> One thing to watch out for though, is competent developers who are unreliable over time. They have the skills, but they spend their time surfing. I think this is more a problem of motivation. I think if you throw enough interesting pr
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I don't know about taking to too far, even if it is a rather pessimistic (or even realistic) view of things. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and a lot of people don't realize that. They only know what they see in the movies: lots of m
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by ryansloan 17y ago
I've got a lot of respect for Seth Godin, but sometimes I feel like his blog posts are just regurgitating facts we already know. Yes, it's important to talk to whoever will be consuming your product. Yes, it's important to set clearly defin

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