I think you misiterpreted me, I agree with you (I do it myself). I was merely pointing out that claiming that hands-free is safter than holding a phone up to your ear is equivalent to claiming that driving stick is dangerous.
Also, Valedictorian is not just about your grades, it's also a personality contest. That means she's likely an "in crowd" sort of person, which is also a sign of being self-absorbed.
Lots of people get 4.0 grade point averages, only one is valedictorian, and while I'm sure they exist, I've never met a valedictorian that wasn't a complete douche bag.
That's a bit of bullshit, huh? First of all, different schools have different definitions of "valedictorian." My graduating class had 3, with one of them being one of my good friends in high school. There was no "personality contest" involved, and I can assure you that my friend is not a complete douchebag. He was very competitive (particularly with me, because I excelled without trying in high school), but he was never douchy or particularly self-absorbed.
While I'm happy that you think books on tape might have helped your driving, it's really the same confidence people have when driving drunk.
What? Those are two completely different things, with two completely different effects. Driving drunk chemically reduces reaction time and impairs judgement. No ifs/ands/buts about it. Listening to books on tape reduces monotony with low-priority background activity, similar to listening to music, but spoken prose is significantly less repetitive than most western music.
I can see the argument for a good story drawing in someone's attention too much, but there's two things fighting against your assertion: books on tape do not require interaction (which is what studies I have read to-date have discovered - talking to someone on the phone is distracting because they ask you questions). Also, a large part of inattentiveness for long car rides is due to repetitive actions slowing down your processing time, which is something that a BoT can help.
As alternative anecdotal evidence, I noticed during the drive between Chicago and Philadelphia that it's much easier to drive to Philadelphia. I'm used to Midwestern flatlands, which are very boring; I found that the hills and curvy roads (eastern Ohio and all of Pennsylvania) made it much easier to stay attentive behind the wheel. Driving the reverse, I probably should have stopped around the middle of Indiana and taken a nap, because the boredom of one realllly long straightaway (I-80) was killer on my alertness.
Obligatory xkcd reference. Someone needs to write a bot that searches slashdot posts for keywords (like velociraptor) and auto-responds with obligatory xkcd references.
I do believe that The Internet is a proper noun, in the same that Wikipedia is a proper noun. There can be many other internets (like Internet2), along with corporate intranets (though big companies probably call their own "The Intranet", and rightfully so), and many other wikis or encyclopedias. But there is only one Internet, and it happens to be the biggest internet of them all.
...I explain to him that there are plenty of dimensions and you can make new ones up whenever you want...
Next time your dad asks about dimensions, point him to eHarmony. They claim to match people "across 29 dimensions". That definitely sounds like taking a big questionnaire, some sample matches (both successes and failures), and simply applying principal component analysis to the results. Apparently, they've found that 29 dimensions is enough to describe compatibility sufficient for their clientele's standards. Along those same lines, a former co-student of mine was measuring human jawbones, and found that they're 4-dimensional (sorry, don't have a reference). It's really interesting from a forensic point of view to take a "model jawbone" and be able to tweak it with 4 independent knobs, and be able to produce the general structure of 99% of all possible jawbones for the species[1].
PCA goes in the other direction, too... if you have a set of points in 3-space and the are all collinear, you'll be able to identify by the eigenstructure that that data is really only one-dimensional, and you just happen to be using the wrong axis to identify that. That may be an easier way to start than by talking about extra dimensions, since it has a tangible explanation.
[1] Now that I think about it, it would be really neat if someone did this with canine skeletal features. You could see how many dimensions a dog skull has, and where in this N-dimensional scale you could compare wolfs to terriers to pit bulls etc.
They're the original Wiki as far as most of us are concerned. The fact that there's a million things calling themselves Wiki-whatever. We're in a thread about that Wikipedia.
From what I learned, Ward Cunningham created the original wiki. You can wallow in ignorance, or you can learn new things. I know people will use "Wiki" as slang for Wikipedia the same way they use "Dave" as slang for "The Dave Matthews Band" (which particularly bothers me, since it implies the rest of the band that's not named Dave is insignificant)... but that doesn't mean I won't correct people. It's not pedantry, it's knowledge.
You can lose everything you have in a hurricane. That's not fear mongering, it happened.
Yeah, and that's been happening for millenia. It's terrible, I'm not arguing against that. Using it as a basis for arguing that climate change has as much financial impact as a recession is what's fear mongering, in much the same way as using the "terrorist threat" to manipulate national policy is.
Re:If you people really believe this then what now
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 1
The full story comes out! You're so pessimistic about the US and capitalism because you've gotten crushed under its foot. Unfortunately, there's always someone who draws the short straw, regardless of the intended economic system. But you might consider researching moving to a different nation, if you think it'll improve your lot in life.
And our kids wont have much time to play either because they have to go to school on the weekends and during the summer to compete with those Asian kids.
...and any sympathy I could have had for your predicament has immediately evaporated, upon seeing such a stupid racist comment.
As long as we are a capitlaist country, everything I said in my post will remain true.
Did you forget about the FCC? FDA? SEC? Or any of the other regulatory organizations whose underlying purpose is to enforce fairness to the common man in situations where a 100% capitalist system would be inhumane?
...there is reason to think that during a recession with a falling dollar and rise in the cost of oil, along with climate change, that perhaps that drop in income could make a HUGE impact on the life of the children.
The cost of climate change could include increased health care costs for your children due to environmental pollution
I get the falling dollar and the cost of oil part. But climate change??? global warming is not the same as local pollution, and it just sounds like you're fear-mongering now.
Unit tests, especially if written and organized in an intelligent fashion, can be of tremendous value in eliminating small coding errors that were not inteded but are bound to creep in if the project is large enough [emphasis mine].
If unit tests help to eliminate what was not intended, what will save us from the small coding errors that were intended?
Caring about the users is fine, but last I checked, they were paying me by the day. The faster I get the job done, the faster they get their app. I can code it up in C in a year, or in Haskell in two months; which serves the user better?
It depends on a lot of factors. If you follow the advice of "care about the users", then you should already know the answer.
One of the reasons that I prefer Unix-like OSs to others is that the whole shell/pipe thing makes doing this sort of stuff really easy.
No kidding. I find that the easiest way to run functional/system tests on my C++ code at work is to write small command-line apps that integrate well with the shell, and then put all of the testing functionality into bash scripts and regular expressions.
It also has the side effect of making my software much easier to maintain by application support guys, because it's designed with scriptability in mind.
My particular example was a homework assignment, and I happened to be at a friend's place rewriting it in C++ while I verbally assisted him in his implementation, so my time wasn't at a premium. However, the example of text processing is one of those good examples where performance matters. If I wanted to use this program to look for cheating on student essays, that 10x performance difference looks like the difference between 5 minutes and an hour.
But I suppose if I had to integrate all of this into a larger application (or a web-frontend, or an interactive GUI), I'd probably write it as a C++ shared library with a very thin "extern C" API for binding into Python/Perl/...
Write a quick five-liner in python, it might take 100ms to run. Spend a few hours writing equivalent code in C, it might take 10ms to run. Scale this up to million-line (in C code) applications.
To give you some perspective, I did perform an experiment along these lines. I wrote a Python script to measure the entropy, cross entropy, and KL-divergence of words in a text file with some basic smoothing models applied. It was about 250 lines of code. I rewrote it in C++ mostly out of curiosity. My naive implementation was about 10% more code, and ran at about the same speed (mostly it's disk I/O and comparing std::map<std::string,int> to Dict()). I spent a bit more effort and ended up with a 450-line solution using better data structures. The end result (as I look back and run timings) is that it's about 8 times faster when examining a 12k file.
If I didn't already have the design figured out in Python, it would have taken much longer to write the C++ solution... but having a prototype right there really helped. For performance-critical code (like performing anything more complex than O(n) on a large dataset), it was definitely worth it to spend the extra time on a better implementation. Honestly, the biggest benefit was using both languages in order to end up with a good design and a good implementation in a reasonable amount of time.
If you're interested, I can provide the source for comparison (I just don't want to put up a public link to my private svn repo).
Too true—I provide a very small fraction of the total tax revenue of the state and federal governments; but last I checked, suffrage in the US was independent of tax revenue, so it doesn't matter too much. Besides, it's tough to argue about the cost/benefit ratio of public TV programming when it's completely dwarved by other things the US federal government spends money on, like Vietnam^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIraq.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misiterpreted me, I agree with you (I do it myself). I was merely pointing out that claiming that hands-free is safter than holding a phone up to your ear is equivalent to claiming that driving stick is dangerous.
A few generalities...
Men would probably be just as bad at routine driving if the sidewalks were full of hot women.
That's a bit of bullshit, huh? First of all, different schools have different definitions of "valedictorian." My graduating class had 3, with one of them being one of my good friends in high school. There was no "personality contest" involved, and I can assure you that my friend is not a complete douchebag. He was very competitive (particularly with me, because I excelled without trying in high school), but he was never douchy or particularly self-absorbed.
*HIGH FIVE*
Why do you think hands have anything to do with it? The mental distraction is the problem. Or do think people driving stick are equally dangerous?
What? Those are two completely different things, with two completely different effects. Driving drunk chemically reduces reaction time and impairs judgement. No ifs/ands/buts about it. Listening to books on tape reduces monotony with low-priority background activity, similar to listening to music, but spoken prose is significantly less repetitive than most western music.
I can see the argument for a good story drawing in someone's attention too much, but there's two things fighting against your assertion: books on tape do not require interaction (which is what studies I have read to-date have discovered - talking to someone on the phone is distracting because they ask you questions). Also, a large part of inattentiveness for long car rides is due to repetitive actions slowing down your processing time, which is something that a BoT can help.
As alternative anecdotal evidence, I noticed during the drive between Chicago and Philadelphia that it's much easier to drive to Philadelphia. I'm used to Midwestern flatlands, which are very boring; I found that the hills and curvy roads (eastern Ohio and all of Pennsylvania) made it much easier to stay attentive behind the wheel. Driving the reverse, I probably should have stopped around the middle of Indiana and taken a nap, because the boredom of one realllly long straightaway (I-80) was killer on my alertness.
Fixed that for you (if you live somewhere urban, at least).
Obligatory xkcd reference. Someone needs to write a bot that searches slashdot posts for keywords (like velociraptor) and auto-responds with obligatory xkcd references.
I do believe that The Internet is a proper noun, in the same that Wikipedia is a proper noun. There can be many other internets (like Internet2), along with corporate intranets (though big companies probably call their own "The Intranet", and rightfully so), and many other wikis or encyclopedias. But there is only one Internet, and it happens to be the biggest internet of them all.
Gah, I feel like I've just been typing "This is my rifle. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.".
Next time your dad asks about dimensions, point him to eHarmony. They claim to match people "across 29 dimensions". That definitely sounds like taking a big questionnaire, some sample matches (both successes and failures), and simply applying principal component analysis to the results. Apparently, they've found that 29 dimensions is enough to describe compatibility sufficient for their clientele's standards. Along those same lines, a former co-student of mine was measuring human jawbones, and found that they're 4-dimensional (sorry, don't have a reference). It's really interesting from a forensic point of view to take a "model jawbone" and be able to tweak it with 4 independent knobs, and be able to produce the general structure of 99% of all possible jawbones for the species[1].
PCA goes in the other direction, too... if you have a set of points in 3-space and the are all collinear, you'll be able to identify by the eigenstructure that that data is really only one-dimensional, and you just happen to be using the wrong axis to identify that. That may be an easier way to start than by talking about extra dimensions, since it has a tangible explanation.
[1] Now that I think about it, it would be really neat if someone did this with canine skeletal features. You could see how many dimensions a dog skull has, and where in this N-dimensional scale you could compare wolfs to terriers to pit bulls etc.
From what I learned, Ward Cunningham created the original wiki. You can wallow in ignorance, or you can learn new things. I know people will use "Wiki" as slang for Wikipedia the same way they use "Dave" as slang for "The Dave Matthews Band" (which particularly bothers me, since it implies the rest of the band that's not named Dave is insignificant)... but that doesn't mean I won't correct people. It's not pedantry, it's knowledge.
Yeah, and that's been happening for millenia. It's terrible, I'm not arguing against that. Using it as a basis for arguing that climate change has as much financial impact as a recession is what's fear mongering, in much the same way as using the "terrorist threat" to manipulate national policy is.
The full story comes out! You're so pessimistic about the US and capitalism because you've gotten crushed under its foot. Unfortunately, there's always someone who draws the short straw, regardless of the intended economic system. But you might consider researching moving to a different nation, if you think it'll improve your lot in life.
Did you forget about the FCC? FDA? SEC? Or any of the other regulatory organizations whose underlying purpose is to enforce fairness to the common man in situations where a 100% capitalist system would be inhumane?
I get the falling dollar and the cost of oil part. But climate change??? global warming is not the same as local pollution, and it just sounds like you're fear-mongering now.
What do you use to measure your coverage? 100% of execution paths taken or 100% of lines executed is not sufficient to prove correctness.
If unit tests help to eliminate what was not intended, what will save us from the small coding errors that were intended?
It depends on a lot of factors. If you follow the advice of "care about the users", then you should already know the answer.
No kidding. I find that the easiest way to run functional/system tests on my C++ code at work is to write small command-line apps that integrate well with the shell, and then put all of the testing functionality into bash scripts and regular expressions.
It also has the side effect of making my software much easier to maintain by application support guys, because it's designed with scriptability in mind.
My particular example was a homework assignment, and I happened to be at a friend's place rewriting it in C++ while I verbally assisted him in his implementation, so my time wasn't at a premium. However, the example of text processing is one of those good examples where performance matters. If I wanted to use this program to look for cheating on student essays, that 10x performance difference looks like the difference between 5 minutes and an hour.
But I suppose if I had to integrate all of this into a larger application (or a web-frontend, or an interactive GUI), I'd probably write it as a C++ shared library with a very thin "extern C" API for binding into Python/Perl/...
To give you some perspective, I did perform an experiment along these lines. I wrote a Python script to measure the entropy, cross entropy, and KL-divergence of words in a text file with some basic smoothing models applied. It was about 250 lines of code. I rewrote it in C++ mostly out of curiosity. My naive implementation was about 10% more code, and ran at about the same speed (mostly it's disk I/O and comparing std::map<std::string,int> to Dict()). I spent a bit more effort and ended up with a 450-line solution using better data structures. The end result (as I look back and run timings) is that it's about 8 times faster when examining a 12k file.
If I didn't already have the design figured out in Python, it would have taken much longer to write the C++ solution... but having a prototype right there really helped. For performance-critical code (like performing anything more complex than O(n) on a large dataset), it was definitely worth it to spend the extra time on a better implementation. Honestly, the biggest benefit was using both languages in order to end up with a good design and a good implementation in a reasonable amount of time.
If you're interested, I can provide the source for comparison (I just don't want to put up a public link to my private svn repo).
If they really are dying... I'd say only one thing:
FINALLY!
There is no finally! That's what destructors and the RAII idiom are for, duh.
Excel!
Too true—I provide a very small fraction of the total tax revenue of the state and federal governments; but last I checked, suffrage in the US was independent of tax revenue, so it doesn't matter too much. Besides, it's tough to argue about the cost/benefit ratio of public TV programming when it's completely dwarved by other things the US federal government spends money on, like Vietnam^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIraq.