How many people can you say that about programming?
About 30-35 years ago I remember how people would be playing around in Basic on the weekend for entertainment. It really isn't that far-fetched, and messing around with the tape deck and volume control just to let things load made people realize that programming is a lot like Building in the Real World, where having a PZ screwdriver instead of the PH you really need sort-of-works but makes your life a hell of a lot harder. I don't know what it's really like today, I've been doing it professionally for too long, but I still see quite a few newbie questions around Stackoverflow, Gamedev.net, people reading about the Raspberry Pi on the train, etc. etc. I think it's still going on.
Maybe I'm biased, because I've done some pretty crazy remodeling on a house, but building software is a LOT like building houses, lots of people just have really strange misconceptions about how well houses are(n't) built. Those same people are often in management, have to get an expensive second contractor in after the first one totally cocked up the extension to their 5-bedroom house because the I-beams he brought were a couple of inches shorter than spec but oh well, there is NO WAY that correlates to writing software (even though that's supposed to be their management expertise).
Programmers aren't special little snowflakes. People generally just do stupid things.
You most certainly can, for hot water purposes. It doesn't outright replace other power sources, but it does drive down energy usage significantly during times when there is enough sunlight.
You can always recognize the shills and sycophants because they claim only climate scientists are important.
No, I'm simply applying logic - the statement you were refuting was "99.8% of climate scientists accept AGW". The paper you quoted has the following statement:
"Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists who publish mostly on other topics,
were the two groups most likely to be convinced that humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their
concurrence.".
There clearly is dissent about AGW (in the details if not in the large), even within the science community, and the topic of "what to do about it" is even more thorny, but it remains that studies including the one you quoted repeatedly show that around 9 out of 10 people specialized in climate do think AGW is real.
Wow, is there anything else than productivity in your life ?
As someone currently coping with anxiety issues and possibly mild to moderate depression while in the start-up phase of my own company: I have tended to need productivity like a drug. The feeling of having failed if a day is not productive enough (in my own eyes) can set me off on a bout of anxiety. It's a problem (and that's exactly why I used the phrase "like a drug") - I put myself at serious risk of not allowing downtime, or feeling really guilty about downtime which then triggers the anxiety again.
And society marks that productivity as success ("the most successful people need little sleep!", "it's about quality time, not quantity time!", there are so many examples). When your head isn't on right, it's hard to remember that you work to live, not live to work, and that life isn't just about world-changing achievements.
Man up is poor advice, but minor depression tends to clear itself up after a few months so it does have some merit (and the depressed person will hate you for saying it).
Man up is great advice, as long as you take it to mean "man up and have the courage to seek out help".
Bitcoin is still young. This is a time or risk and opportunity. Besides, if you really think anyone should invest money, for example in the stock market, without spending lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff, I have a bridge to sell you.
English is universally derided among them for being the easiest to learn.
It's odd to deride a virtue.
Perhaps their command of the English language is a little less than their inflated multilingual egos make them think?
I consider myself quite bilingual - Dutch and English. I speak, think and dream in both of those languages quite easily. People here in the UK are sometimes surprised to learn that I'm not English and my first language is technically not English. I speak quite a bit of French, and have a reasonable grasp on understanding German, Portuguese, and by extension Spanish and Italian.
English is "easy" because it's almost impossible NOT to be exposed to an awful lot of English all the time. English language music, films (no dubbing in Belgium), English books, some English at school. Though I do believe as well that early exposure makes the biggest difference. When I was young there was a northern irish boy who'd come over for a month during the summer holidays (how are you doing these days, Niall?), and as kids you ignore the gaps and errors, and learn to use the language for what it was meant to do: communicate. As soon as you're communicating, imitation and learning will take over and fill in the gaps.
Knowing many languages is a bragging point. Being able to communicate with many people is a skill.
Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place.
Programming non-trivial things without bugs is very, very hard, and very often not cost-effective.
Just build clear bug-free pieces, and assemble them.
The combination of two bug-free pieces isn't necessarily bug-free. The glue code is where you typically end up with the subtle assumption and domain bugs.
Take the time and care with each line to verify intention.
What is the intention of 3rd party code? What is the *exact* intention of the code you wrote 6 weeks ago? You may have documentation. It may even be really good. It's unlikely to be 100% complete.
Use modularity and error handling.
Error handling and modularity in and of themselves do nothing to reduce buggyness, though they may make it easier and faster to find the more obvious and often-occurring ones. They are good practice though, and I strongly recommend them.
I'm sure I'll be called naieve, but at least should move the smallest error free program to a much larger size.
Sometimes being naive isn't bad - it often makes you aspire to better than the status quo, which isn't a bad thing. However, many "bugs" aren't even programming errors, they are communication failures somewhere between the customer and the developer. What the customer wants, what the customer asks for, and what the customer actually needs are three different things.
But none of that will work when given a timeline half what it should be, and inadequate budget.
A program that solves some of the problem now, even with bugs, is infinitely more valuable than a program that solves all of the problem (or more frequently, a small subset of the problem correctly) when it is too late. That goes back to the "cost effectiveness" - the solution that generates the most profit is the better one in a capitalist situation.
There are other situations, such as healthcare, or community projects (open source), where "cost" either doesn't factor or is subservient to other goals such as safety, but it's not the general case.
That still isn't a green light for cowboy coding, but if you're dead-set on bug-free you might find it hard to deliver.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 1
My first thought too (posting to undo bad moderation on parent).
I never said that they'd perform worse, but that they would find other ways to make the money that they are capable of making, e.g. they could leave the area that makes such ridiculous laws.
Let them. There are plenty of others to take their place. The idea that there's only a tiny number of people that have the unique capabilities of doing these jobs is ludicrous.
And another possible hypothesis to test is that a pay cap will stop these jobs from attracting highly social manipulative psychopaths hell bent on just getting rich at the expense of everyone else, instead of actually running a company properly.
If I had the only key to the server room and got fired but didn't turn in the key, I would expect retribution of some form, especially if the office had a steel door that took weeks to break down.
What kind of idiot budgets for a server room with a steel door that takes weeks to break down but doesn't include a duplicate key for the security office to hold? Why isn't that idiot the one in jail? What if you lost the key, would you still be OK with being sent to jail for not returning it?
If you were responsible for the key, and lost the key, you might very well be liable for the damages caused by having lost the key. If it was Terry Childs' responsibility under a reasonable interpretation of the terms of his job contract to ensure continued access to the servers (and it seems that's along the lines of what the courts have now decided) then he was in violation of his employment contract for actually doing so.
It was potentially naive for the employer to trust him with this much power, but it's equally likely they had no technical idea that this was the case. The only other option beyond trusting your highly skilled employees is to have at least two people for every job, and then hope they don't actually collude to cause trouble anyway.
The contract doesn't magically disappear into thin air - it ends under the termination terms of the contract. Those are almost certain to state that you are required to return all property, physical or intellectual, that belongs to your employer and you were granted access to for the purpose of performing your role. The passwords are quite obviously important intellectual property of the employer. The "getting hit by a bus" case is irrelevant in this particular case (even though correct planning for it would have prevented Terry Childs from holding the passwords hostage) - Terry Childs wasn't killed and didn't disappear off the face of the earth, he was fired and was still required to follow the termination terms of his contract.
For a minute I thought the title was "NSA Internet Spying Sharks Race To Create Offshore Havens For Data Privacy". Those would have been some cool sharks.
IMHO, C++ is a simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful language... IF (and only if) you know how to use it.
If you think C++ is simple or intuitive you haven't used it enough, and/or enough of it. There is nearly always some dark corner of the standard that does something which is at first glance totally illogical until you understand the way the compiler or history has had to deal with the construct in question. The most vexing parse, for example, or the fact that there are three char types (char, unsigned char and signed char are distinct types).
I sometimes tend to think the opposite: some of the evolution's achievements seem so precisely engineered that it feels more like a designer's product than test of time. Not that I would actually believe in intelligent design and all that stuff.
Most "precisely engineered" stuff that's actually engineered is still the product of large quantities of trial and error, at some level:)
Slashdot Mirror
(Wait, did I just hear you denying that the general) problem of "other peoples' code" is an actual problem?
Because if so, I think you may be the script kiddy in a minimum-wage cubicle farm.
Bonus points for realizing that your own code from three months ago is also "other peoples' code".
How many people can you say that about programming?
About 30-35 years ago I remember how people would be playing around in Basic on the weekend for entertainment. It really isn't that far-fetched, and messing around with the tape deck and volume control just to let things load made people realize that programming is a lot like Building in the Real World, where having a PZ screwdriver instead of the PH you really need sort-of-works but makes your life a hell of a lot harder.
I don't know what it's really like today, I've been doing it professionally for too long, but I still see quite a few newbie questions around Stackoverflow, Gamedev.net, people reading about the Raspberry Pi on the train, etc. etc. I think it's still going on.
Maybe I'm biased, because I've done some pretty crazy remodeling on a house, but building software is a LOT like building houses, lots of people just have really strange misconceptions about how well houses are(n't) built. Those same people are often in management, have to get an expensive second contractor in after the first one totally cocked up the extension to their 5-bedroom house because the I-beams he brought were a couple of inches shorter than spec but oh well, there is NO WAY that correlates to writing software (even though that's supposed to be their management expertise).
Programmers aren't special little snowflakes. People generally just do stupid things.
No, you can't really do it at home scale.
You most certainly can, for hot water purposes. It doesn't outright replace other power sources, but it does drive down energy usage significantly during times when there is enough sunlight.
It's like this one song I came up with that was just one note over and over, but every now and again you bend it a little.
That's Bleed by Meshuggah.
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
You can always recognize the shills and sycophants because they claim only climate scientists are important.
No, I'm simply applying logic - the statement you were refuting was "99.8% of climate scientists accept AGW". The paper you quoted has the following statement:
"Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists who publish mostly on other topics, were the two groups most likely to be convinced that humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their concurrence.".
There clearly is dissent about AGW (in the details if not in the large), even within the science community, and the topic of "what to do about it" is even more thorny, but it remains that studies including the one you quoted repeatedly show that around 9 out of 10 people specialized in climate do think AGW is real.
That study covers meteorologists, not climate scientists. Weather and climate are not the same thing, and only 13% of the survey respondents identified climate as their area of expertise.
My third language is actually french - my original post was repeating a joke, falsely attributed to G.W. Bush.
The French do tend towards language chauvinism.
Pah, they don't even have a word for entrepreneur.
Wow, is there anything else than productivity in your life ?
As someone currently coping with anxiety issues and possibly mild to moderate depression while in the start-up phase of my own company: I have tended to need productivity like a drug. The feeling of having failed if a day is not productive enough (in my own eyes) can set me off on a bout of anxiety. It's a problem (and that's exactly why I used the phrase "like a drug") - I put myself at serious risk of not allowing downtime, or feeling really guilty about downtime which then triggers the anxiety again.
And society marks that productivity as success ("the most successful people need little sleep!", "it's about quality time, not quantity time!", there are so many examples). When your head isn't on right, it's hard to remember that you work to live, not live to work, and that life isn't just about world-changing achievements.
Man up is poor advice, but minor depression tends to clear itself up after a few months so it does have some merit (and the depressed person will hate you for saying it).
Man up is great advice, as long as you take it to mean "man up and have the courage to seek out help".
With exactly the same "support is going to stop" warning plastered all over it.
Bitcoin is still young. This is a time or risk and opportunity. Besides, if you really think anyone should invest money, for example in the stock market, without spending lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff, I have a bridge to sell you.
Monkeys do better than people in the stock market - I'm sure they did lots of market research beforehand though.
English is universally derided among them for being the easiest to learn.
It's odd to deride a virtue.
Perhaps their command of the English language is a little less than their inflated multilingual egos make them think?
I consider myself quite bilingual - Dutch and English. I speak, think and dream in both of those languages quite easily. People here in the UK are sometimes surprised to learn that I'm not English and my first language is technically not English. I speak quite a bit of French, and have a reasonable grasp on understanding German, Portuguese, and by extension Spanish and Italian.
English is "easy" because it's almost impossible NOT to be exposed to an awful lot of English all the time. English language music, films (no dubbing in Belgium), English books, some English at school. Though I do believe as well that early exposure makes the biggest difference. When I was young there was a northern irish boy who'd come over for a month during the summer holidays (how are you doing these days, Niall?), and as kids you ignore the gaps and errors, and learn to use the language for what it was meant to do: communicate. As soon as you're communicating, imitation and learning will take over and fill in the gaps.
Knowing many languages is a bragging point. Being able to communicate with many people is a skill.
Skype? Hah. Remember ICQ?
Uh-oh!
Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place.
Programming non-trivial things without bugs is very, very hard, and very often not cost-effective.
Just build clear bug-free pieces, and assemble them.
The combination of two bug-free pieces isn't necessarily bug-free. The glue code is where you typically end up with the subtle assumption and domain bugs.
Take the time and care with each line to verify intention.
What is the intention of 3rd party code? What is the *exact* intention of the code you wrote 6 weeks ago? You may have documentation. It may even be really good. It's unlikely to be 100% complete.
Use modularity and error handling.
Error handling and modularity in and of themselves do nothing to reduce buggyness, though they may make it easier and faster to find the more obvious and often-occurring ones. They are good practice though, and I strongly recommend them.
I'm sure I'll be called naieve, but at least should move the smallest error free program to a much larger size.
Sometimes being naive isn't bad - it often makes you aspire to better than the status quo, which isn't a bad thing. However, many "bugs" aren't even programming errors, they are communication failures somewhere between the customer and the developer. What the customer wants, what the customer asks for, and what the customer actually needs are three different things.
But none of that will work when given a timeline half what it should be, and inadequate budget.
A program that solves some of the problem now, even with bugs, is infinitely more valuable than a program that solves all of the problem (or more frequently, a small subset of the problem correctly) when it is too late. That goes back to the "cost effectiveness" - the solution that generates the most profit is the better one in a capitalist situation.
There are other situations, such as healthcare, or community projects (open source), where "cost" either doesn't factor or is subservient to other goals such as safety, but it's not the general case.
That still isn't a green light for cowboy coding, but if you're dead-set on bug-free you might find it hard to deliver.
My first thought too (posting to undo bad moderation on parent).
Agile is for Teams/projects without a clear goal, vast experience and wÃre nobody knows how to solve it directly.
So basically every project then?
I never said that they'd perform worse, but that they would find other ways to make the money that they are capable of making, e.g. they could leave the area that makes such ridiculous laws.
Let them. There are plenty of others to take their place. The idea that there's only a tiny number of people that have the unique capabilities of doing these jobs is ludicrous.
And another possible hypothesis to test is that a pay cap will stop these jobs from attracting highly social manipulative psychopaths hell bent on just getting rich at the expense of everyone else, instead of actually running a company properly.
If I had the only key to the server room and got fired but didn't turn in the key, I would expect retribution of some form, especially if the office had a steel door that took weeks to break down.
What kind of idiot budgets for a server room with a steel door that takes weeks to break down but doesn't include a duplicate key for the security office to hold? Why isn't that idiot the one in jail? What if you lost the key, would you still be OK with being sent to jail for not returning it?
If you were responsible for the key, and lost the key, you might very well be liable for the damages caused by having lost the key. If it was Terry Childs' responsibility under a reasonable interpretation of the terms of his job contract to ensure continued access to the servers (and it seems that's along the lines of what the courts have now decided) then he was in violation of his employment contract for actually doing so.
It was potentially naive for the employer to trust him with this much power, but it's equally likely they had no technical idea that this was the case. The only other option beyond trusting your highly skilled employees is to have at least two people for every job, and then hope they don't actually collude to cause trouble anyway.
my contract ends with you the day you fire me.
The contract doesn't magically disappear into thin air - it ends under the termination terms of the contract. Those are almost certain to state that you are required to return all property, physical or intellectual, that belongs to your employer and you were granted access to for the purpose of performing your role. The passwords are quite obviously important intellectual property of the employer. The "getting hit by a bus" case is irrelevant in this particular case (even though correct planning for it would have prevented Terry Childs from holding the passwords hostage) - Terry Childs wasn't killed and didn't disappear off the face of the earth, he was fired and was still required to follow the termination terms of his contract.
(in another country, no less)
You guys are unbelievably paranoid sometimes.
Um, dude.
For a minute I thought the title was "NSA Internet Spying Sharks Race To Create Offshore Havens For Data Privacy". Those would have been some cool sharks.
IMHO, C++ is a simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful language... IF (and only if) you know how to use it.
If you think C++ is simple or intuitive you haven't used it enough, and/or enough of it. There is nearly always some dark corner of the standard that does something which is at first glance totally illogical until you understand the way the compiler or history has had to deal with the construct in question. The most vexing parse, for example, or the fact that there are three char types (char, unsigned char and signed char are distinct types).
I sometimes tend to think the opposite: some of the evolution's achievements seem so precisely engineered that it feels more like a designer's product than test of time. Not that I would actually believe in intelligent design and all that stuff.
Most "precisely engineered" stuff that's actually engineered is still the product of large quantities of trial and error, at some level :)