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kaitnieks's comments

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Why I (A Woman) Stopped Telling Young Girls to Go Into Engineering

Is it impossible that one of the girls you discouraged from going into IT would love to be in the tech-centered culture you mention? Is it biologically impossible for women to enjoy exploring their field? Couldn't one of these girls turn out to be a genius and create the big picture and the vision for a change and show it to the IT guys, if only she wasn't discouraged?

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Languages for Bad Programmers

Wouldn't his goals just fix the symptoms? If a programmer can't run the program in head, he most likely will program by putting strings of commands together in various combinations following his intuition or vague memory about similar code seen before, but basically it will be voodoo programming. Even by having compiler that runs it for you and tells you it's wrong, you can't get far by guessing all the time.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: FizzBuzz in 123 languages

I'm not sure if the code was changed or my mistake. Anyway, now it will print out Fizz and then the number when number divides with 3 (but not with 5).

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers

I don't understand why people are forced to write on whiteboard. Some get very stressed and lose their ability to think, some can't multitask (paint on whiteboard, think and talk to the interviewer at the same time). Just give them the task, give them a computer, give them 30 minutes of privacy and then let them explain the complete, working and tested solution - you get better results as this situation is more like regular coder's daily routine.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Remotely pat your pet with Kinect and a Wiimote

Amusing. I guess the next step is to simulate the feeling of the pressure of the brush, so you know for sure that you are indeed brushing the cat. If this can be done, the next step of casual gaming will be amazing.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Lytro cameras are ready for preorder.

I remember that these cameras could make the whole picture to be in focus. I think 3-d movie makers should start using similar technology because it's kind of weird when you're watching a 3-d movie with the glasses and the background is blurred even if you're looking right at it.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Firefox and IE's "View source" can be spoofed to show anything

Older Internet Explorer and Firefox versions displayed the source that was downloaded, not the one generated/modified by scripts. It makes so much more sense, especially since there was always an option to view the generated source (by using JavaScript for an example) but I don't see how you can access the downloaded source at all if View Source is replaced by View Generated Source. Hm, actually one could use FireBug and watch Net response I suppose, but that's inconvenient.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: How do I find unused functions in my PHP project?

Naturally, thanks to the nature of dynamic programming, it won't find gems like:

  $a = 'awesome';
  $func = $a . 'Func';
  $func();
so if you're using this on a project that was written by someone else, then don't just blindly delete everything. But this should be expected.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Ideas on how to change the Culture at a big Corporate Bank

Please, please keep us updated about how it goes for you, whether you succeeded or failed. I generally don't believe in change in culture and thinking, unless it comes from a leader or authority figure, so I always kind of work around these things, but I would be so glad to know that it is possible and that you succeeded.

From my experience, it's even hard from a leader to change an existing culture, the most effective way that has worked for me is to make up a set of clever rules that reward the "correct" thinking and punishes the "wrong" thinking, instead of trying to talk people into doing things in a new way.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: Is anyone there?

Latvian Facebook clone has solved this by marking sent messages as read/unread. I think people use that system way more than e-mail here. Maybe there is going to be something that will replace e-mail worldwide in a similar way. Actually, I'm sure GMail could implement it right now if they wanted, for messages sent from and to GMail accounts.

kaitnieks | 14 years ago | on: A notebook and a pen can be a highly effective personal productivity system

Actually, pen & paper have magical properties, which are probably backed up by some psychology, which is not known to me (yet?). Obviously, things like geometry for games & effects, drawing interface mockups and others involving visual diagrams are much easier to do on paper, but also things like creating project estimates by splitting it in subtasks, writing a list of features & ideas to consider etc - basically creative induction of lists, works better on paper even though you would think computer would be better for it, since you can insert and move around text. It's like when I sit at the computer, my creativity shuts, but when I sit at the paper, it starts flowing.
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