Viewing profile — kowen

I've had some success playing with wordoid.com to come up with "name-ey" or "word-ey" names.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names. My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Ta…

I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and …

I second (third?) this. You can also use a ViaJet (some people prefer it). You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation. If you add irr…

One discovery that kind of blew my mind a few months back was approvals. I've seen the entire bowling game kata done with a single test. It's a bit different to code against a fail…

This gets even more embarrassing if you're used to typing in dvorak. I can never remember the actual keys I use to perform certain actions - my fingers obviously know how, but my b…

> Just ask any man who has spent twenty minutes waiting for a woman to put on her face, only to find that she looks hardly different when she comes out from the bathroom than she d…

The speaker in the TED video didn't actually say that people weren't motivated by carrots in the tasks that required creative thought, just that carrots didn't improve performance …

The female engineers I know seem to approach "everything as a problem to be solved" too.

Interesting! I wonder if people know this instinctively, or we just sort of pattern match in the background and pick up on it.

Yes, "why" would be extremely interesting! It would appear that the research on the subject is somewhat spotty and often gets misinterpreted, sometimes at the source. I found a boo…

Somewhat arbitrarily this brings LOLCODE to mind. http://lolcode.com/examples/hai-world

Have you tried the readability bookmarklet? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970

Ah, right! Rereading the thread, that seems the more likely interpretation.

It's hardly a placebo effect if it has an effect for a few hours. I've struggled with insomnia my whole life. If I'm able to fall asleep in the first place, I'm usually able to sta…

Actually, if what he says is true (and I'm reading it correctly), then the Fed can print lots of money, lend it to the US Government so that they can pay off the national debt... b…

I've found that pair programming for a bit can help me get past that initial resistance. It doesn't have to be anything special or official - just a shared screen with a friend ove…

> only doing say 2 hours work a day Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowb…

For those interested in this subject, I would suggest looking into ROWE - Results-Only Work Environment. http://gorowe.com/ The basic tenet of ROWE is to stop doing busy-work, and …

I once was asked to help a designer make her own webpage. She made everything circular... and the menu rotated. sigh

A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time looking at job boards and craigslist, and the experience was not a delightful one. Finally I found a company that hadn't posted any list…

If I were given a chance to do it over, I think I'd beg to be allowed to unschool for k-12, and then go to university. University was where it started getting relevant/interesting …