jcmhn

When I'm learning a language I write comments for myself. Notes about syntax, idioms, gotchas, and whatever else.

When I'm fixing a problem I leave XXX markers around to easily keep track of what I'm doing.

When I'm writing maintenance code I reference the ticket number, describe the problem or feature, and why we implemented the fix or feature the way we did.

You should never see the first two types of comments in checked in code, but I bet that I've probably saved later maintenance programmers hours of frustration with that last type of comment.

"You want something stupid? Okay - here's all the stupid you can handle."

Browsers need to be silent by default regarding things that users are not equipped to make decisions about.

So it's an online strip club slash chuck-e-cheese. Too cool.

(As an added bonus I get the best terminal emulation compatibility since... well, since ever)

My time was a bit later, late 80s to early 90s - but at that time the general rule as I experienced it was that above-average women and exceptionally attractive men could get away with multiple dating partners, but it was off limits to the majority,

The system was a decade ahead of its time, but imo the owners broke it by continually fiddling with the rules in an attempt to keep people from turning karma and fans into a way to keep score.

People who aren't into geek things often display contempt of them, viewing rpgs and sci-fi as immature and weird. My guess is that she didn't even see that she giving off a "listen dorks, don't invite me to play pretend wizard with you" vibe. Because my experience is that geeks are enthusiastically inclusive.

Your time is valuable, and needs to be protected from people who want to take it without giving you anything. Ideas, OTOH, are worthless without ability and perseverance to actually turn them into something. Don't be an idea rat - share your stupid ideas and the person you share it with might improve it for you.

The republicans could pick up some disaffected democrats as single issue voters on hot-button topics. But the social conservative agenda that the republicans are married to is fairly distasteful to people who regularly vote democrat - even if the parties are 95% identical in practice.

I got the "12 balls, find the fake" question at an interview once. It seemed to be more a tension killer than anything anyone in the room really cared about. The actual interview was a series of questions along the lines of: "how would you go about doing X, sketch code or pseudo-code on the whiteboard and then explain it".

Real users are way funnier than troll-wannabes could ever be, because they sometimes manage to mangle and misunderstand things in a way that reveals that they live in a completely different universe than you do.

The point of the article is that java makes his job harder. There are standard tools (syslog, truss, ldd) that he uses to troubleshoot problems under unix, and java supports zero of them.

Maybe that isn't fair, but there's something about java that seems to make programmers think that uncaught exceptions are an acceptable standard error exit.

Or maybe I'm just really unlucky in happening to run into the problem over and over and over again.

Maybe java itself doesn't suck - I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt because a lot of fairly smart folks seem to like it. But a large number of real life java tools and programs suck. It's to the point where I shudder in revulsion every time I see the telltale indications that a solaris (or even worse - linux) tool is written in java - it promises a future that involves playing with 50 levels of shell wrappers to get a remotely meaningful error message.