The Whiteboard - 2014-03-25 (page 2 of 2)

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8:04 PM

@MichaelT You would have loved Viaweb. That was Paul Graham's Lisp platform that allowed customers to develop websites... in Lisp. Well, a stripped down, sanitized version of Lisp anyway.

@RobertHarvey Simple and sensible does seem to be what I see in OWIN; so that mostly rings true.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Possibly. It would have been neat to be a coder back in grand days of Lisp at a Lisp shop. Might be interesting to slip some Scala in now days.

@MichaelT indeed, that would have been neat. All the cool work in this industry was done by the mid 90s... Ever since all we've done is mostly make webpages. Before then, people would work with all kinds of technologies at all different companies. The minority technology stacks were still far higher % of the industry than the minority stacks are now...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Depends... theres still a fair bit of non-web page things out there... though it can be difficult to ferret out.

When you think back to the era of majority Pascal, C/C++, COBOL; the minority languages of the era were still in industry use far more I bet than the minority languages are now.

user55340

8:10 PM

Legacy code lives forever. I did a bit of C at my former employer... and a LOT of work on the point of sales system (not a web page)

The more I look at Lisp, the more I realize that its power has mostly to do with the simplicity of its syntax. It's possible to write functional programs in C#, but people don't, because the syntax is too burdensome.

Same for C and C++

Especially true for Java.

user55340

(rant time) the thing that irks me the most about my former employer is that it could be a good place to work. Working on the systems that take 10k+ transactions/day/store - thats neat! Working on 1.5 MSLOC systems? thats neat! But instead of making it fun to work with the huge systems that people wish they could work on... they made it painful to be employed there.

Because of the annoyances like the bathroom thing?

user55340

Yep. And if your'e 6 min late you got written up... and if you took a lunch break > 1h 5m, you got written up. And if you made too much noise when discussing architecture?

Oh, God. I hate that shit.

user55340

8:13 PM

I handed HR a stack of 40 index cards with individual issues for them to address in my exit interview.

Which they promptly put in the circular file.

user55340

No... I don't think so. But HR was powerless... and that was one of the cards.

If they cared about it, it would have already been fixed.

user55340

The problem is higher than HR can address in a single owner private company.

That's right. Problems like this always come from the top.

user55340

8:15 PM

And you can't fire the owner of a private company like you can have the board boot the CEO.

user55340

Change your company or change your company.

It's oppressive to work in such environments. That's no accident; the owner wants oppression, wants employees to be powerless. And then wonders why he can't get anything done.

user55340

Other things like my peers were moving to other companies too - that I didn't have anyone I could discuss architecture problems with...

Many owners don't put enough effort into cultivating their "human capital," because they don't realize how important that is. They look on employees as "resources," interchangeable cogs in a machine.

They never read "The Mythical Man Month."

user55340

The thing is companies don't realize they are all really tech companies

user55340

8:18 PM

My former employer thought it was a retail company with an IT department...

What was their actual product?

user55340

@AshleyNunn readwrite.com/2014/02/25/…

Well, if you expect to run an IT department the same way you run a hardware store, you might be in for a rude shock.

I love the way you can find anything you want on any hardware store's website now, but most of it you have to special-order.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Welcome to my former employer.

user55340

Trying to find that old forbes article...

8:23 PM

I keep telling myself the software industry is young, and that things like this will be better in 20-40 years... though now I think I may be kidding myself.

user55340

Now Every Company Is A Software Company

@MetaFight It gets worse. If you're over 35, you're considered over-the-hill in the software industry.

jeez. I'm 32.

user55340

@MetaFight hn.algolia.com/?q=ageism#!/story/forever/0/ageism

user55340

@RobertHarvey So yea... thats the thing. It could be a great place to work. Its quite frustrating that it isn't. And until the owner dies/divests its not going to change.

user15026

8:35 PM

@MichaelT Now if they would just hire me.

in Workplace 2014 Election, 18 mins ago, by RhysW

So just a side question, what happens if nobody nominates themselves for the elections?

user55340

in Workplace 2014 Election, 10 mins ago, by Shog9

@RhysW shut the site down, give the top users a red stapler, thank you all for playing

@MichaelT Works for me. TW, yeck ;P

user55340

@JimmyHoffa What if they added licensing to their scope so we could migrate all those questions there? ;-)

but I'm going to get my stapler so haters gonna hate

8:47 PM

@MichaelT all the more reason to close TW, migrate license Qs into the abyss

@enderland I'll be honest; I'd be jealous for the stapler.

20

Q: Workplace Stack Exchange - Top User Swag (With A Surprise!)

As a thank you for being awesome by working so hard to launch a successful site, if you are on page 1 or 2 of: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all ... I'll be reaching out to you this week to get your information to send you a little care package. What's in this s...

discussion featured

change that "would be" to "am" :-)

user55340

user image

user55340

user image

@MichaelT Not a swingline. Who cares.

user55340

I complained about my colleauges' odours in a public forum, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. /couldn't resist — Yannis yesterday

user55340

9:03 PM

in Workplace 2014 Election, 7 mins ago, by RhysW

I love Odeds tendancy to squish things that should be squished

9:15 PM

Re that troll from earlier: SpamRam caught him. His IP is now in the bottom of that big net wide bucket of spam IPs. Not sure about the details, but he won't be able to do much (if anything at all) with his newest account. Thanks for the flags everyone.

user55340

@YannisRizos Ahh... the drama of the day.

9:30 PM

hey, I have a binary rep

my rep is 18

shit, 19

useless crappy programmers don't even know binary anymore

user55340

Polling time... terminal colors: amber on black or green on black?

@MichaelT always amber.

we stare at monitors too much to have any form of green shy of barely-visibly dark

I think I've not had a monitor running over 15% brightness in years...

@MichaelT what green? the bright green that makes your eyes burn?

user55340

user image

Facebook just announced they bought Oculus VR. Interesting

9:40 PM

@MichaelT absolutely not

@MichaelT please tell me that's not yours

@Ampt less interesting, more "huh?"

user55340

@enderland Nope...

3D virtual...face booking? The eff?

facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971?stream_ref=1

yeah thats my thoughts too

9:41 PM

@JimmyHoffa The natural expansion path is to ... Bodybook

@psr what you're telling me is next I'll see a headline, facebook buys fufme? :O

[has 70's computing flashback]

@RobertHarvey IT'S OK! YOU AREN'T GOING TO SMASH THE STACK, JUST STEP AWAY FROM THE MODEL-M SIR

(ok fair enough, model M's were post-70s unless I'm mistaken)

orbs... I see orbs...

@JimmyHoffa We'll call Google Glasses and raise.

9:45 PM

I was listening to a story on NPR about Google Glass yesterday. I think it would be really cool to read the newspaper while I'm driving.

Kidding, of course. Although a heads-up display for a GPS would be nice.

@RobertHarvey I'm just looking forward to all the cat videos I'll watch on my way in to work every day

Cat jumps at camera... You swerve to avoid it, killing the poor defenseless road sign...

@MichaelT WANT

user55340

My niece (3.95 years old) knows where on the trip into town the data connection drops out.

Is that the Metric system for age?

user55340

Her birthday is this weekend.

9:49 PM

Official Oculus VR release about it's partnership with facebook

@JimmyHoffa my ambient lighting is really bright and that makes my eyes hurt to put so low :(

@enderland eesh, bright ambient lighting sucks, but it always seems dark the first time I get a monitor and tune it down, 5 minutes later I don't notice anymore and it seems normal from then on. Whenever I see a monitor on normal brightness it's interesting to learn how much color computers can give off... :)

I also diddle with the contrast to be less straining. Moral of the story, I should never be allowed to pick a color palate for a UI

3-D Facebook? WTF.

@JimmyHoffa that's what I feel like when I go to a white background not using flux (which should be a mandatory OS setting honestly)

user55340

s/WTF/FTW/

9:53 PM

WTF.reverse()

Pretty soon the "iPhone vs Android" debate will give way to "Google Glass vs Facebook Frames".

10:11 PM

@dylanribb "Facebook Frames" isn't even a funny joke :(

@enderland Yeah I'm going to go jump off the building now.

10:27 PM

That means Instagram gets a new 3D filter.

A whole new way to see what your friends are eating right now.

do you guys know about domains

1 hour later…

11:32 PM

What do you mean by "domains"?

the domain of a function? a business domain?

being the master of one's domain?

I mean run all the main methods

11:57 PM

I mean like

domain

like google.com is a domain

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