Viewing profile — skermes

The Retain keyword is similar to the effects from Treasury or Mandarin in Dominion, where you put some card(s) back on top of your deck during clean up if you meet the condition. T…

Yes, the fact that you can send email to people who aren't using your email system is the main thing that's keeping chat services stuck as part of a company's communication tools a…

I don't know if it's really that rare, though. From where I sit Maciej is playing the fox/anansi/trickster character to a tee, with a healthy dose of ha ha only serious ( http://ww…

I don't get the logic that starts with "Technology is moving fast but email doesn't change" and leads to the solution being papering over email's faults with some slick UI. It's li…

1) There's nothing wrong with using a phrase (like "Your life would probably ...") instead of a word. That's kind of what they're for? 2) What about "can"? It's not a drop-in repla…

You joke, but http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2012 LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that …

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm... ?

When I spend all day hopping up and down through different levels of abstraction in the service of building some particular program, it's all too easy to start confusing the map wi…

I can't claim credit for this, but: Knock, knock Who's there? Interrupting coefficient of friction Interrupting coeff -- MUUUUUUU

A lot of people bring up the idea of rigor when I compare prose and code, and I think it's really overemphasized. Just think of English as a language with a really flexible type sy…

The same way that it's your fault if your new building doesn't provide adequate wheelchair access, not the wheelchair's fault for not being able to climb stairs.

To expand on mrk-hn's comment, I don't think the comparison is entirely without merit. From what I can tell, a lot of the scorn directed at hipsters (or at least the "hipster" arch…

I have enormous respect for designers, and I know full well that I, a programmer, can't do what you do and that anything I might produce that puts pixels on a screen benefits immen…

I'm not sure why it'd be a goal to find a way to do code reviews that doesn't involve version control. We review everything everything before it gets merged into our mainline branc…

I'll do you one better: bug reports filed as screenshots of a web page showing an exception message pasted into a word document, attached to an email. Of course, the screenshots ha…

Please do enlighten us: what is the correct clothing to wear on a website when you discuss attempted suicides? Should we make sure to stick to earth tones so that we respect the so…

You can actually add more fonts, though it requires editing the registry and doesn't work for all fonts, I think. It does let you at least get Consolas, which is good enough for th…

We have a number of failing tests that we've marked ignored at work. There are a couple reasons we don't remove them from the test suite entirely: Some of these tests are from the …

It's not actually that ironic. Robots tend to be symbols for an oppressed underclass - their masters have (or think they have) a high degree of control over their every thought and…

In my more expansive moments I've even used 'trip dub' to cut it down to even fewer syllables than letters.

People with dyslexia apparently find Comic Sans substantially easier to read than many other common computer fonts: http://www.dyslexic.com/fonts It would be interesting to have so…

Not quite, I'm afraid: http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/pearlharbor.asp

Yes! I was just looking for an app to reinforce my unimaginative opinions about heteronormative lifestyles and socially regressive gender roles! Void in my life: filled.

It seems like the best response to both that mistake and that situation would have been to have a policy of pulling any error messages (or other text that'll be visible to users) f…