Viewing profile — MikeTaylor

[flagged]

How tragic that the goal of startups isn't to make something useful but to get acquired (with consequent inevitable dismemberment and shuttering). Well done on the $200M, I guess.

Just dropping in to say that The Elements of Programming Style is worth reading three times — and I have read it many more times than that, and benefitted from it. Here's my review…

It's amazing how much science just gets no funding to speak of. There are maybe half a dozen museums in the world whose palaeontology departments are not in a permanent budget crun…

And yet, it's what a lot of old-timey software engineers consistently did. Yes, we work in a more complex ecosystem than they did, but I can't shake my sense that 90% of the reason…

I did wonder how much to soften this message, because yes, of course, there really ARE times when a breaking change is necessary. But I think those account for maybe 1% of the majo…

There is the GitHub WSAPI but that is, of course, proprietary to GitHub and can't be used to access repositories on GitLab or elsewhere.

Usually the best solution is not to ask for date of birth. I guess about one in ten of websites that ask me that actually have a legitimate reason for needing to know. (In the pres…

Consistent for someone who uses the same site on lots of different devices and browsers. I wonder how many of those there are? Not consistent for someone who uses lots of different…

Gee, it's a real head-scratcher, isn't it?

I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many o…

I wonder what he would make of _I Am The Walrus_, which uses every note-named major chord (A, B, C, D, E, F and G major).

Striking that there were more shoemakers than tailors.

This is the subject of Blue Öyster Cult's song _Magna of Illusion_.

SIDE-ISSUE ALERT! The article ends with the statement "The author declares no competing interests". I think this is very poor phrasing, as it's ambiguous: does it mean "The author …

I would trade all these things, in a heartbeat, for the ability to keep other tabs/windows working when one tab is in a hard loop. That one facility is the thing that means I can't…

> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites f…

Strange that this paper doesn't even _mention_ GraphQL.

> In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent ... writes a man who was evidently not paying…