gbvb's comments

gbvb | 9 years ago | on: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

Without sounding like a curmudgeon, "An even more egregious form of negative work is a developer who is stuck using out of date programming practices AND has a large amount of influence at a company. " can happen when new developers come up with ways of re-writing applications without understanding the full problem statement or spending the time to understand the existing codebase. Usually, they might have worked on a small to medium sized projects and show up to work on a project with millions of lines of code with teams in different geographies and expect to change things across the board. When the same explanation has to be given the 15th time, you can turn into a toad and start saying "NO" first. :)

gbvb | 10 years ago | on: Cache-Control: immutable

Is there a write up on how this is implemented? I want to find out more about this model of delivering content.

gbvb | 10 years ago | on: People with names that break computers

if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

- Thing One and Thing Two.. I wonder if it will fail..

gbvb | 12 years ago | on: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business.

So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?

gbvb | 12 years ago | on: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

I have had lasership make mistakes couple of times (dropping of at the neighbors, claiming no answer when never attempted).. I complained to amazon about the shipping and I have not received any shipment from them via Lasership after that. I am a prime member though. (not sure if that changes)..

gbvb | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

I think the problem is that it is not 'hate' like people are hating java. I think it is more that MS has become 'irrelevant' in circles that matter :) i.e. the consultants who go around telling new companies what to develop in.

If you see the pattern of adoption by developers, I see more developers walking around with Macs, and linux boxes and running VMs to test out IE compat than anything else.

So, MS has become another OS to work with than the OS to develop on. imo.

I had been in MS ecosystem for 10+ years before moving to other technologies and it has taught me more about concepts of distributed computing (dos and donts) than anything else. I can apply those to any problems i see today. But, I will likely not not develop another asmx and aspx page.. :(

gbvb | 12 years ago | on: Google is defragging Android

I think there might be a need for providing a decent layer between the various closed layers created by Amazon, Google et al. At least, that would allow apps to be friendly to Android without marrying Google Play.

(Is there one?)

gbvb | 13 years ago | on: Principles of Flat Design

Thank you for that explanation and the example. I love that calculator. I see why skeumorphic free design is hard to find. :)

gbvb | 13 years ago | on: Principles of Flat Design

Do you have good examples of true 'flat' design? I fear that if we are too flat, will it endup becoming an abstract entity that needs explanation on what that is meant to be? I thought the ones you point out seemed like good examples of not too abstract kind. :)

gbvb | 13 years ago | on: Don’t build. Compose

Software development is like movie making: http://www.silicon-stories.com/movie-making-software-develop...

Software architecture is like city planning: http://www.windley.com/archives/2003/09/enterprise_arch_4.sh...

Software development is not like manufacturing: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/10/is-software-develop...

Software development is like manufacturing: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321150783/codihorr-2...

I believe that software development can be disciplined (development of missile control systems, payroll systems) or be agile (instagram, pinterest, facebook...). I think it all depends on what is considered to be the most valued resource for the organization and the software it is planning to build/compose/manufacture/make.

If we value system resources (real time constraints, compliance, SLA), we tend to be more like building systems. If we value end users experience in the final outcome, it tends be agile and take the notion of the movie/novel et al.

gbvb | 13 years ago | on: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

IMO, Art exists for the sake of itself. It serves no other purpose. It has no intrinsic value. Whether you like it as is or not is a different question.

So, while anyone call anything art, If the random shopper is doing to have a surprise gift every month, it is not exactly art. But, he is doing to this to show the world how random materialism looks like, I guess he has a point. :)

gbvb | 13 years ago | on: Runaway complexity in Big Data... and a plan to stop it

The interesting part about timestamping change to records is essentially "effective dating" and it is bread and butter in any transactional system that needs to record employee info. This is done varying degrees to columnar values or entire rows themselves. In an RDBMS, you will create a compound key to allow you to know the history and the current record. I guess the new fangled NoSQL will make it easier to store it easily..?
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