cwinters's comments

cwinters | 14 years ago | on: Java 7 is now available

True, but the gap is much, much larger between JDK Date/Time classes and Joda vs that between Joda and JSR-310.

cwinters | 15 years ago | on: Why Netflix Chose Amazon’s Cloud as Their Computing Platform

Have you tried to go through this process? Amazon seems to have done a good deal of work to ensure its servers and practices are HIPAA-compliant: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/04/06/whitepa...

I think, as you allude, that the primary issue is not technical but behavioral. In the area of healthcare I work in (nursing homes), quite a few organizations have their data hosted elsewhere. Sometimes it's through the vendor, sometimes it's with a third-party service. I don't see that big a leap of faith to Amazon from this.

cwinters | 16 years ago | on: Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition

Medical dictation is a success for recognition, but it's important to remember that no such system can function by itself. Instead, they're often advertised as making the human transcriptionist's job easier -- reducing the number and type of fixes a human has to make when correcting the dictation results.

cwinters | 16 years ago | on: Be careful with magical code

I agree that everything is leaky abstractions. The lesson I get from the idea is to assess the probability of leaks occurring and the risks they present when they do. Some of the ORM ones that the author mentions are pretty onerous.

cwinters | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your best resume tips?

1) Languages and tools should be highlighted if they're exceptional -- e.g., I probably don't need to hear that you used SQL to interact with a database, but if you implemented a set of complex views in T-SQL that's useful.

2) ...which means you need to list your skills somewhere. I tend to categorize mine for easier scanning (languages, databases, frameworks, build infrastructure) but YMMV. If something sticks out there I'll ask about it -- "how did you find the experience of implementing a maven plugin?"

3) In the vein of not annoying people who read your resume, name the file you send "FirstName_LastName_resume.pdf" rather than "resume.pdf". Attention to detail matters, and people wind up dumping resumes into a directory with others.

cwinters | 17 years ago | on: Surviving Emacs

I've had a kinesis keyboard for ~9 years, and after using it for a few weeks I thought it should be required for any emacs user. Putting ctrl-alt (and enter) under your strongest digits just makes so much sense.

cwinters | 17 years ago | on: Perl saved my vacation

If you're walking around for 10 hours that's 50 photos an hour. Given a conservative four photos per shot, that's only ~12 actual shots per hour, or one every five minutes. Doesn't seem like 'looking down the view finder' to me.

And knowing Tom, he probably walked around for 12 hours :-)

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