smithbits

6 ms·

1.
by smithbits 1y ago
Yes. I just had a bad experience with an online shop. I got the thing I ordered, but the interaction was bad so I sent a note to their support email saying "I like your company, but I recently had this experience that felt icky, here&#
2.
by smithbits 2y ago
The short version is I got lucky. The slightly longer version is that at the small company I was doing tech lead things because I learned I could get more done to help people by helping organize the other engineers. Then when my boss quit
3.
by smithbits 2y ago
For me it was management. I was an SDE who started caring more about the users of my code than about the code itself and that led me to a team lead position and that led to management at a small company and that led to management at a big
4.
by smithbits 2y ago
It's worth keeping in mind that lean manufacturing and all the interesting things that Toyota did that get written up are about building cars. In software the equivalent process is compiling and deploying code. Writing software is eq
5.
by smithbits 11y ago
His shelf seems to be an almost perfect superset of mine, the only obvious thing I don't see is Fire In The Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, a very nice history of the early PC revolution in Silicon Valley. I should proba
6.
by smithbits 11y ago
Networking. Every time I see a non-technical friend have to know anything about the DNS to set up a website it makes me cringe. And while we're at it, why isn't my new laptop online by default? I realize that there are tremendo
7.
by smithbits 11y ago
There's a product called the Efergy True Power meter that does exactly that. It measures mains electricity, wirelessly reports to a central server and shows you real time and historical graphs of energy usage at sub-minute resolution.
8.
by smithbits 12y ago
When this happens in dictionaries it's called a "ghost word" and dates back to the 1800's. Here's the wikipedia page on the topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word
9.
by smithbits 13y ago
I think the author is making an excellent point about needing better math in journalism. An article in the NY Times yesterday about online shopping China had this line (pulled from a press release) "Tmall.com, one of Alibaba’s shopping
10.
by smithbits 13y ago
I'm a little confused by the conclusion that "It is up to donors to do their research and donate in a way that will maximize the support they provide for charities." I gave a 10 year old Honda Civic with 198,000 miles on it to KQED. A tru
11.
by smithbits 13y ago
I think there are plenty of really really good programmers who are lousy negotiators. For these people a 15% cut could easily be made up for by a good agent. It's not perfect for everyone, but for people who are better coders than busines
12.
by smithbits 14y ago
How big was the game board? It doesn't seem like running life backwards would be an obvious thing. If I have a 3 by 3 grid with the center turned on I think there are 8 choose 3 or 56 possible previous boards that would lead to that. I g
13.
by smithbits 14y ago
This isn't specific to Redline, but do take a look at the RoarVM http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/renaissance/ a many core research implementation of the Smalltalk VM that does some very interesting things with non-determinism. Also there ar
14.
by smithbits 14y ago
Seems like the obvious PR thing for Roddy McCuish to do is go and have his meeting with Martha and her father at the school, for lunch.
15.
by smithbits 15y ago
And here's the IMF study it's based on http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/09/Berg.htm
16.
by smithbits 15y ago
How much of this is that the company was hugely influenced by the founder? Steve Jobs was famous for making sure all the machines at the NeXT factory were painted the same color and that no third party logs were displayed. A certain kind
17.
by smithbits 15y ago
We're all familiar with the "phone / phone / half day puzzle fest" interview technique but has anyone ever done any testing on it? At any large company like Google or Microsoft it seems like it would be easy to run some ringers through the
18.
by smithbits 15y ago
It's true, but you'll be competing with bubble-based companies for talent. Why do I want to work for a reasonable, growing small business with it's customers and profits when I can get twice as much money in San Francisco working at some v
19.
by smithbits 15y ago
Here's a low quality video of the factory from back in the day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhfUKEu7sJ0 (The copy of the video is low quality that is, the original production values were excellent)
20.
by smithbits 15y ago
What are you like? Do you enjoy digging really really deep into a problem? Perhaps a big company that provides the stability to work on a problem for years is the right place? Do you like doing lots of different things, none of them deep
21.
by smithbits 15y ago
"Software engineers of corporate America are wired in a way that promotes fear. It hurts creativity and growth." I'm horrified to say that I just can't get past that bit of hyperbole.
22.
by smithbits 15y ago
My quest for languages that say "Yes" ended with assembly. I started in BASIC and found the strait jacket it imposed much too restrictive. Then Pascal was the big teaching language but it has it's own ways. It wasn't till I got good as x
23.
by smithbits 15y ago
"The truth is that for some it does and for some it doesn't." A pleasantly reasonable thing to say.
24.
by smithbits 15y ago
But to actually be the next Bill Gates he or she will have to not get picked. Then 30 years from now the story will be "If only I'd gotten that intership at Google I'd never have started this amazing company. What? You've never heard o
25.
by smithbits 16y ago
I thought Penny Arcade broke this back in 2007 with the piece "The Microsoft Zune: 2006-2006" http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/01/10/
26.
by smithbits 16y ago
Almost always certainly, but I'm not sure about the perfect one to one-ness. I take enormous pride in my work. It's important to me personally that I do a good job. There are tasks I have to do as part of my job I in no way love (integra
27.
by smithbits 16y ago
"... an independent consultant with expertise in quantitative investment techniques who will review disclosures and enhance the role of compliance personnel." I assume this is press-release-based and so pretty thin on actual information, bu
28.
by smithbits 16y ago
I woke up from a dream the other morning and could still see a mini-map of my house in the upper right corner of my vision. There were little blue exclamation points for all my daily quests. Brush teeth, take shower, make breakfast, etc.
29.
by smithbits 16y ago
"Surely you're not learning much by repeating JMC's flawed Ur-Lisp from 1959." No. Implementing an ur-lisp teaches you all kinds of things if you've never implemented a programming language before. It's a solid bite-sized project that's
30.
by smithbits 16y ago
<> Find out which operating system the OS class at your university uses, waaaay back in the day it was AT&T Unix, then there was Minix, these days it's usually a flavor of Linux or BSD. Find the web page for the class tha

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