rudd

I love this. The implementation would be so much nicer if they would extend it to full books, but it still works perfectly for previews. The scrub bar, the previous/next arrows, and all the other stuff make it very similar to other common web elements. Very nice.

The plural of corpus is 'corpora': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_corpus

I came into my current job having always pronounced it Ess-Cue-Ell. However, not a single person at my job has pronounced it as such. Sequel all the way. I quickly picked up the local pronunciation.

I'm surprised that so many people here are saying that pure-CSS buttons are actually a good thing, because they're programmatic. Sure, they're programmatic, but the code behind them is really confusing. I'd much prefer to use a sane drawing environment like an HTML5 canvas or the Raphaël library. Raphaël is perfectly suited to this sort of thing. Anything you make in Illustrator, you can make with Raphaël, and you get nice, clean code.

Note that {} still means an empty dictionary, not an empty set.

Absolutely. If you hear the startup life glorified enough on sites like this, there's a chance you're going to want to start a startup, but you won't have an idea yet. Also, some people just naturally recognize ideas, whereas other people might have just dismissed annoyances as "the way the world is."

I actually disagree that that is nicer. e^(ipi) = -1, which means you can square both sides to come to the also factual statement, e^(itau) = 1. However, if you only knew the latter you'd be wondering whether e^(i*pi) would be 1 or -1.

I don't have Menlo on this computer (still on Leopard), but from what I can tell from comparing this font to my current coding font, Droid Sans Mono, they must be very similar. It's okay, but it looks like all the things that annoy me about Mensch are the things that were changed from Menlo!

Sure, Firebug may in fact have bugs. However, a sometimes buggy program is better than one with fundamental flaws. IE6's rendering errors have cost developers thousands of hours in finding and fixing problems, because everyone runs into them, whereas Firebug has only ever been an aid to developers, running into bugs only occasionally. In all the time I've been using Firebug, I've never encountered a bug. In fact, I've encountered more bugs with Chrome's dev tools, in that it seems to have stopped displaying XHRs in the console.

Firebug may suck compared to an ideal Firebug, but IE6 sucks compared to the standards-compliant browsers that everyone else has moved on to.

I love the glossy screen on my iMac at work for one reason: I can see when someone is walking up to my desk behind me. The great expanses of darkness in the empty spaces of my text editor make the screen a gigantic mirror.

I currently commute 4 hours a day (2 hours each way) on the subway and trains. I hate the subway because it's crowded, and on the train I always feel like I'm fighting for a good seat. I wish I didn't have to commute like this, but that's the only choice when your significant other's job is so far away from yours. Between a short commute and a girlfriend, I choose the latter.

Plus, the entire time I can be listening to music or podcasts, and on the train I can be catching up on Twitter or stuff in Instapaper. I'd be spending that time doing it anyway.

But I can tell you this -- I'm the only 22-year-old on that train.

On the StackOverflow podcast, I believe he mentioned something about not wanting to dominate the blogging world anymore. Someone says "Joel" and everyone else thinks "Spolsky." Yet, he doesn't mention that at all here. I wonder what's up with that?

Also, he says he's going to quit "for the most part" podcasting and public speaking. Is this also the end of the StackOverflow podcast? Seems unlikely that he'd force that onto Jeff, who seems to like it a lot.

It's actually the same length in Python. Just take out the extra line breaks from the gist:

    def hasmethods(obj, *meth_names):
        return all(hasattr(getattr(obj, m, None), '__call__') for m in meth_names)

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the date is right at the bottom of the post: "(Published Nov 10th, 2004)"

I think more interesting than this actual article is Fog Creek's "QA and Test Specialist" job listing linked at the end: http://www.fogcreek.com/Jobs/QA.html

There are a bunch of small errors on the page that are the kind of things they'd expect a tester to catch and require fixing for. For example, "you've" is written with a backtick ("you`ve"), "valuable" is spelled with the letter L as a numeral one, "morale" is spelled "moral," etc. I wonder if in the phone interview they're going to bring these up. If they didn't notice the errors, they're probably not the right hire!

It may be unfair to candidates trying to get a job at Facebook if they didn't come from Stanford or Harvard, but it's completely reasonable to focus their hiring efforts on those two schools. It makes it less work for them.

As a plus for non-Stanford/Harvard grads, it means if you don't want to work for Facebook, you have less competition from Stanford/Harvard grads!

Backspace works here on my 10.6 Macbook in both Safari and Firefox. Though, Command-w to close it doesn't work for me.

I'm confused by some of these transliterations. For instance, they spell out "pxasik" and say it's pronounced "puh –(lip smack) askik." Where did that first [k] in the pronunciation come from? The author also types out that "x" to represent the "lip smack" and something he describes as a click (in "skwawng"). While I imagine the lip smack is the bilabial click, ʘ, he clearly distinguishes between the two, so I wonder what's with using "x" for both. Though, it might be through assimilation. Or maybe he's mistaking clicks for ejectives?

With that title, I was hoping for a more in depth linguistic overview for those of us with knowledge of phonetics.

Sure. You're right. Unless you also want to have a social life, or fulfilling relationships with people. I won't say that it can't be done, or that it can't be done to some degree, but it's much harder to sustain other parts of your life if you're spending so much time on one thing.

If you're spending 16 hours a day painting, then you might change the world of art. If you're spending 16 hours a day working on your business, you might change the world of business. Or at least your business. But you sure as hell aren't going to have a happy spouse. You're going to lose connections to friends.

This is especially relevant at this time of year. As any Christmas movie will tell you, thinking only of yourself and your work is not going to make you fulfilled.

Enjoying yourself such that you lose track of time -- when it happens all the time -- is a bad thing. Imagine yourself saying the same thing about anything else you can get addicted to. "I watch 14 hours of television a day because I genuinely just enjoy it." "I drink 14 bottles of beer a day because I genuinely just enjoy it."

Maybe it's something with my corporate routing/firewall/who knows, but I just get an error saying my browser can't find it (no matter the browser). For that reason I really hope this doesn't catch on.

A weird problem I'm getting: it focused in at the top of Brooklyn for me (where I am), and showed some restaurant deal (this: http://postabon.com/pc/deal?guid=138&lat=40.694&long...). However, it was at the top of the map. Instead of trying to click a small target, I pulled the map down so that it would be in the center. As soon as I let go of the map, the point disappeared and loaded a bunch of other pins a bit further north. It'd be great if you could make it so you didn't delete the pins that were on screen before a move and stayed on screen after the move.

I could just as well have replied to any of the other comments below this talking about IQ, but I wanted to make sure people know that 1) IQ is not a perfect measure of one's intelligence, nor even necessarily the type of intelligence needing for programming, and 2) IQ tests are far from perfect in even measuring IQ. I don't know my IQ because I've scored anywhere from 120 to 200 on IQ tests.

It sort of reminds me of a video I saw when the original iPhone came out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jgYdtBn-8w

I know packaging looks nice and presents the device well, but I think it should be first priority to make sure people can open the thing without dropping it. The iPhone literally requires you to let the bottom part of the packaging fall a bit while you hold on to the top part.

It's worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not normally a full-on blogazine; only this particular article was like this. Their previous post was much more in the format of a normal blog: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/18/designing-css-but...

There's at least one problem with this approach: trying to sign up with a username that's already taken. If you want the username "foobar" and it's already taken, you're just going to get a "wrong password" error, when you really wanted to sign up. That certainly creates some sort of user confusion.

Why do you want to keep the use of a work computer and a personal computer separate? I suppose I can understand wanting to keep personal data on your own computer, but people aren't going to be happy being forced to drag a laptop to and from work just to check personal stuff during the day. They won't see it as you being lenient about using personal stuff on the network, they'll see it as you being very strict about what touches your precious work computer.

You should let people choose what sort of setup they want (within reason). Let them get a desktop if they just want to work in the office (which seems to be what you want anyway), and let them get a laptop if they prefer that. Linux, Mac, Windows, whatever. Let developers choose their own machine setup and they'll thank you for it. I can't even say how happy I was that I wasn't forced into a particular setup at my current job.

This is like those stories where the story is artificially separated into different pages for more ad views, except you're forbidden from clicking.

That said, it was a good story so far, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest. I'd like to understand how you can easily go from an idea to pre-order food over the Internet to reddit.

Yeah, it's easy. When you deal with logic problems all day. Or if you're used to solving problems in your head.

Personally, I solved it easily in my head. But, I had to read the problem the first time, then read it again slowly getting all the numbers into the proper places in my head. An interview is a stressful place, so easy things can get a lot harder.

It's funny how an article about Java the language comes up and almost every single comment here is attacking either the article or the language. Like it or not, Java is one of the most popular languages, so there are going to be a lot of people who want to improve it to make it more usable.

As the article said, Microsoft has proven with C# that you can take a language and evolve it over time for the better. If Java the language wants to be viable and keep up with what programmers want from a language, then it's going to have to release an update with changes like the ones outlined in the article. I think the article hit the nail on the head with some of Java's biggest problems (though not all). These changes would make it so that Java could be used in the way a lot of people want to use it.