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 Taiwan, not mainland China.

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 the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure).

I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms.

Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.

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 irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental floss with dental tape and "buff" your teeth (floss:tape as thread:ribbon - buffing with a thread doesn't work too well). Makes a huge difference in the buildup of plaque.

Lastly, disclosing tablets or solution (picking one at random from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W6LW6I) is not just for kids. Using it for a few weeks or months could help you see where your tooth brushing technique is a bit weak.

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 failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small increments, but you don't necessarily get to green immediately. Slightly disturbing if you feel somewhat obsessive about seeing the green bar.

Locking down legacy code is beautiful. There is a screencast where the guys who developed approvals lock down a battleship game, generating about 8000 lines of output, not even glancing at them, and then refactoring the hell out of it.

http://approvaltests.sourceforge.net/

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 brain has no longer retained the actual mapping. And I can't just look down at the keyboard to figure out which key it is, since I don't have a dvorak keyboard, just remapped the qwerty one to use the dvorak layout.

> 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 did when she went in.

> It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking

It seems like it would only make evolutionary sense if the males noticed the difference.

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 in those situations.

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 book on amazon the other day called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by neuroscientist Lise Elliot, which is next up on my reading list.

http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesom...

One study I read about described a situation where the researchers bundled the same baby up and told some people that it was a boy and others that it was a girl. The people who thought it was a girl tended to comfort the baby when it got fussy, and the people who thought it was a boy tended to try to distract it.[1] Subtle, but I can imagine that there are other ways that we train girls to be more 'face to face'.

[1] from http://www.amazon.com/Failing-At-Fairness-Schools-Cheat/dp/0... --marred by some selection bias in the data they used, but very interesting nonetheless.

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 stay asleep long enough to get rested.

I only need the effect for about an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Long enough to fall asleep.

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... but then the US Government owes the Fed, and we're kind of right where we started, except with a good deal more money in circulation.

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 over skype can be enough to get going.

> 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 snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and negotiate. From what I've heard, both of these actually occur.

Another interesting trend is that employees tweak what they're doing and start working more efficiently, increasing a teams output by as much as 35% without working "more".

> [it] could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck

It would appear that lack of motivation shows up in lack of results and the unmotivated group quickly has to find another job. In one case, a company fired nearly 90% of a particular department, but the retention rate sky rocketed, so their costs went way down, even when you include the cost of having to look for and hire new people.

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 start doing only what matters. Stop wasting everyone's time. All meetings are optional. You work when and where and how you like, as long as the job gets done. That's key, by the way... as long as the job gets done.

The most common objection in the corporate world seems to be "but how will we know if people are doing their job if they aren't in the office from 9 - 5?" and the answer, of course is "how do you know now?" (hint: for the most part, you don't, unless you have clear goals and are judging people solely on output rather than on face-time etc.)

In a start-up this is hardly an issue!

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 listings but that I really liked, and just knocked on their door. I actually still work there.

Recently I got How to get the tech job you love by Andy Lester (pragmatic bookshelf). It's a great read whether or not you have a job.

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 (to me, anyway).

I'm not knocking education in itself, just... so much time wasted while the teacher organizes things, disciplines people, and they managed to take interesting subjects and make them utterly boring.

There are probably great schools out there, but the 7 different schools I went to were not very inspiring.

Excellent question, and thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to look into it!

I'm not railing against profit in itself, I just find that sabotaging a good solution that would profit many people (but not you in the short term) is illogical.

I think CSS itself isn't so complicated, but the whole different support in different browsers thing certainly does make a mess of it!

One of the most helpful things I ever did with respect to CSS was read the apress book on html/css patterns (just ignore the parts that use javascript).

http://books.google.com/books?id=xq9IOomk1tUC

(I never realized that standard CSS actually operates with 6 box models!)

It seems to me that we have the resources and technology to solve a lot of problems for good, but a permanent (or even just "better") solution would get in the way of profit. (I saw the documentary "who killed the electric car" recently, which describes one instance of this.)

There was a discussion here on HN a few weeks back about automating and simplifying taxes http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072955

Automating and simplifying certainly seems like the right thing to do - but lots of people would lose jobs. On the other hand, they would be free to do something more productive (in the larger sense, producing value instead of papering over the cracks) and certainly more interesting!

Why can't we just automate away the boring stuff, and just work less? I'd be interested to see if it were possible to open source more than software. (Open source organic farming, anyone?) I know, I know, this is utopian and unrealistic and probably plain silly.

I'm not trying to suggest that we should all go create a hippie commune and get rid of money, but not solving a problem right because of some legalese or pure profit just seems wrong to me!

Another thing that I find perplexing is that the depression doesn't only put people with automatable jobs out of work. My father is an extremely talented craftsman. He builds traditional log cabins, wooden boats, furniture, beautiful houses... Right now he is living in a van, and not-quite eeking out a living picking fruit. He sells a couple hundred lbs of fruit a few days a week. He also shoots deer every once in a while which provides protein.

He's this great resource, but hasn't had a job for well over 2 years. If he didn't have to worry about food, he'd work for the sheer pleasure of creating something useful and beautiful. The thing that confuses and frustrates me is that my father would be delighted to work for free provided that his needs were met (seriously! Food, a beautiful view, a sauna, and some poetry. Seems simple enough, right?)

He loves to build beautiful things, and certainly there are people who need houses (even small log cabins would be an upgrade for many). I don't know what the solution is (obviously). It just seems strange that legal tender or lack thereof could get in the way of creating real value.

> Refactoring doubly so :-)

Oh, man, the truth hurts!

I would much rather refactor than go out and sell.

There is such a zen to refactoring. It doesn't require intense problem-solving thought, but it isn't mindless. More, hm... mindful. sigh

There was a pretty fascinating talk at TED by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who experienced a massive stroke ("my stroke of insight"). On the one hand she observed her own neurological functions shut down with clinical curiosity, and on the other she had a very strong impression of losing her sense of self and being completely connected with the world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...

These houses don't prevent collaboration - they can be moved around, windows and doors can be open. The difficulty with open spaces/cubicles is that when you are not collaborating, some people won't think twice before interrupting you. When pair programming, it is different: the barrier to interruption seems higher when two programmers are working together. I think the type of 'zone' or 'flow' is different when pairing, too: not quite as deep, but easier to slip back into if you surface.

I have a really hard time zoning out chatter around me, and far too much of the chatter is completely irrelevant (e.g. personal grooming, youtube videos, etc).

I want one!

> Won't real estate expenses be far higher than for a generic cubicle farm?

Even if they are a bit higher, productivity must soar compared cubicle-land. It's shocking and kind of depressing how many tidbits float across those cubicle walls (my favorite this week: "my hair is so shiny today").