Part 1 of your theory seems basically correct. The people stoning women to death are basically mobs of ugly men without wives. Part 2 is a bit more problematic: how did they need to cut down of wife-count if marriage hadn't been invented?
Doubtful on the STDs: most animals use the "free sex approach" with minimal effect on fertility (actually, if an STD makes individuals infertile, that encourages sex with multiple partners.) Also, small breeding populations are not much affected by STDs: everyone is exposed, virulence is low. STDs go wild once you have big cities and travel (jets, wars, or pilgrimages, etc.)
Nah men formalized it and called it prostitution. Women started thinking about how to get more and put out less and that's how we got marriage.
Actually, it was probably the other way around: men formalized marriage in an effort to stop women sleeping around. Stability of the tribe, and all that (alpha males still get to sleep around, beta males get a better chance of their kid actually being theirs, the rest have no illusions.)
Sometimes I wish I could forget everything I've read on primate and avian mating patterns, it would make my life so much easier.
For additional fun, it's past 9pm and I'm now debugging an issue with some minor code that fails in user testing but somehow passed its unittests.
Dig, dig, dig. What a surprise! The author built his own test framework rather than using the common one. Bugs in the code, and the tests lie about the bugs.
Nice work author. Luckily he is no longer with the firm: if you can't do the simple stuff right, it's doubtful you'll be effective at the hard stuff.
I don;t think I missed your point. You check to guide the newcomers towards the approved style. Just like law firms review the work of their associates.
Better style is important. Perhaps we are talking about different environments here. I have informally SLAs of 10 minutes of so from problem report to a fix being deployed to production. If, while debugging, I run into code that is hard to understand because it violates the norms, the author gets woken up immediately and given the problem. if someone wants to screw around building code empires in a live system, they get the calls at 2am.
As for passing the hours... most of my team works 12+ hours/day. They have 3 monitors each, and several compute farms available on demand. It isn't that hard to get a code review request over IM and review the work while your current stuff is running. I trust most code will "work," but crap code will slow down the next person dealing with the code. It's as simple as that.
For example, yesterday I got to review something like:
def foo( bar=None ):... baz = bar and f(bar)... if not bar or baz(a):...
Ugly code because the debugging person has to check how bar and baz are related in the conditional expression. So, "if baz and baz(a)" is the suggestion, and the nicer implementation gets resubmitted a few minutes later. No muss, no fuss: the codebase gets a little better and easier to understand.
"What happens when I leave? Nothing. We have 100+ programmers with almost identical style: they enforce keeping the codebase clean and consistent"
So you have no need to check for compliance, since everybody's style is identical, right? There are actually following a standard established by their employer. Following orders isn't the same as approving of it. In any company, there are those who have the power to change policy sometimes at lower levels, sometimes at higher levels.
As was clearly explained in prior comments, we check all the time. You write your code, you announce you're ready for review, people look at it and comment. If you know what you're doing, you find a good reviewer. There are no orders and policy beyond the "write code so good everyone else loves it." You have a better idiom or style? Defend it well and we will adopt it (only happens 2% of the time though - your senior coworkers have written 1M lines of code each and seen the problems you are going to bring.)
Simple, readable, concrete, idiomatic, with good unittests, is the starting point. If you feel the need to be a lone-genius code cowboy, go live in the wild with codecows: it's unlikely you have much to contribute in the high-value areas.
What fits on a page is really quite simple. Typesetters, etc, have decent rules of thumb about line length, font size, and easy of right-to-left tracking after hitting the end of a line. Somewhere around 140 characters is reasonable for a modern computer. 500 chars is not.
What happens when I leave? Nothing. We have 100+ programmers with almost identical style: they enforce keeping the codebase clean and consistent. Law firms, engineering firms, architectural firms, etc, know how to do this. It's amazing some programming shops do not think this is a basic minimum when it comes to professional product.
I don't even know what you mean by "program correctness." Formal methods? Nailing the spec? Passing the unittests? Doing what the users expect? Selling well? I do know that consistent, understandable, well-crafted code is required for anything more than throwaway projects.
Yes, I'm anal, in the same way that all good professionals are anal.
Once the functions do exactly what their names imply, the code is completely idiomatic, there is zero fat, and everything fits nicely on the page, program correctness becomes much easier to discuss.
So easy, in fact, that poor programmers almost never get to the point of being able to deploy crap into production.
A stock photo firm is going to have a hard time convincing anyone that they had "no reason to believe." They deal with copyright every day, and had better have processes in place to handle disputes fairly.
At the least, the copyright owner should consult a lawyer and consider chucking a DMCA takedown notice at them to wake them up a bit.
Agreed. The definition of a good HR person is soft skills and zero technical/professional talent (else they'd be doing something more useful and highly paying.) Give them rope, and they'll propose people like themselves: pleasant and unproductive.
Although, I wouldn't hire a person I wouldn't be willing to eat lunch with: too much lack of mutual ground makes for high risk.
Hmm, a lot of different programming models are optimal because there are a lot of different business models.
Independent, decent programmers works great for the "grip it and flip it" model of getting software out the door.
I've got 10 million lines of production code, and I want every single change to make that codebase better, not worse. So, yes, you check in a while loop when it should be a for loop, at least two people are going to tell you to fix it before it's considered for production. I bitch about poor function names, bad idioms, pointless abstractions, code that rolls past 140 columns or so: don't leave crap that slows down the next person.
Oh, and each programmer gets 30 or so square feet of workspace, so they have 30 people within yelling distance if they need help while writing the code. Feels like CS-lab, but with rich programmers:)
That's why we don't let our HR department do anything more than post ads, collect resumes, run background checks, type up offer letters, deal with lawyers, and handle workplace issues.
If you let these people get their well-meaning tentacles into your business, you are screwed. These people are the code-monkey version of management: willfully proud of knowing nothing about the actual business needs, and inordinately satisfied with their mad HR skills. Only thing worse than an HR "specialist" is an MBA who works on his MBA skillz rather than learning the business he is being paid to support.
We flushed out a lot of the middle-management parasites twenty years ago. Now they seem to be back with new job titles.
1) I can actually communicate with the people that are paying me. 2) I can write code that doesn't suck. 3) I actually understand the business needs for the code I'm writing.
a) stupidest analogy ever, or b) I have rights because others have might, or c) the world is a confusing place, let's bet on random things, or d) you're a child molester and will be raped (just saying, I think about this stuff a lot.)
Please resubmit your essay with your competition category clearly stated.
We work hand-in-hand with google and push to get as much content on there for free as possible.
Good for you.
I've seen this happen a hundred times: a tech innovation comes along and disrupts a cozy business model.
The immediate response is to fight it, but the tech improvement gets cheaper every year: no matter how you fight, the tech gets cheaper and better every year. Eventually, you find yourself proposing absurdities like hitting consumers with $100K/song for copyright violations.
The more balanced response is to look at what your own business is, and decide how to leverage the free external tech innovations. E.g. New York Times is supposed to be the paper of record: so provide all your old content for free, and charge new content for a few weeks. There, problem solved. Oh, except now you claim to be the Lexis/Nexis of reporting, so better be able to able to back that claim up. Ah, you claim it's your OpEd guys that are the value-add? Sorry, their columns are all over the blogs under fair-use within hours of being published - why do pundits even need a newspaper?
Ben Stein might have been useful in the dark-ages, but now he's just an angry man yelling at the clouds.
Cluebat for newspapers: serve your community in realtime and sell ads to cover costs. Make it easy for users to read your stuff.
If it's "code monkey," you have a problem if you are older: you just cost more and are higher risk: simply old-cog versus new-cog.
If it's an intellectually challenging role, then age hardly matters. Getting the job done is what counts and that's what people pay for.
So, take a breath, take a step back, and ask yourself which of the two categories you aim to be in. If you're not sure, here's one question to help you decide: "what's a closure?"
Heck, at the higher levels, academic credentials become unimportant: understanding of the field, real achievements, etc, because the critical factors.
It's less than clear that carbon on the ocean's floor is just removed from the system. We know crabs eat sunk dead whales, and we know we have a lot of knowledge gaps about deep ocean-floor ecology (heck, we only found out about thermal vent ecologies twenty years ago.)
So, we try the next experiment: seed iron and fine silica - maybe that works in getting the diatoms crunchy enough that they survive the sink to the floor.
Normal people use quotation marks for a reason. You seem to use them like little girls use hearts instead of dots.
I don't really understand your passive-aggressive attitude. It's perfectly fine to be second-rate. We, as a society, need people like you to teach XML, make our lattes, and mow the lawn. Work hard, go home, drink a domestic beer, and be thankful for your $50K/year.
Slashdot Mirror
Given Goldman owns a big chunk of Burger King, it may not even be that valid a defense.
Part 1 of your theory seems basically correct. The people stoning women to death are basically mobs of ugly men without wives.
Part 2 is a bit more problematic: how did they need to cut down of wife-count if marriage hadn't been invented?
Doubtful on the STDs: most animals use the "free sex approach" with minimal effect on fertility (actually, if an STD makes individuals infertile, that encourages sex with multiple partners.) Also, small breeding populations are not much affected by STDs: everyone is exposed, virulence is low. STDs go wild once you have big cities and travel (jets, wars, or pilgrimages, etc.)
Nah men formalized it and called it prostitution. Women started thinking about how to get more and put out less and that's how we got marriage.
Actually, it was probably the other way around: men formalized marriage in an effort to stop women sleeping around. Stability of the tribe, and all that (alpha males still get to sleep around, beta males get a better chance of their kid actually being theirs, the rest have no illusions.)
Sometimes I wish I could forget everything I've read on primate and avian mating patterns, it would make my life so much easier.
For additional fun, it's past 9pm and I'm now debugging an issue with some minor code that fails in user testing but somehow passed its unittests.
Dig, dig, dig. What a surprise! The author built his own test framework rather than using the common one. Bugs in the code, and the tests lie about the bugs.
Nice work author. Luckily he is no longer with the firm: if you can't do the simple stuff right, it's doubtful you'll be effective at the hard stuff.
I don;t think I missed your point. You check to guide the newcomers towards the approved style. Just like law firms review the work of their associates.
Better style is important. Perhaps we are talking about different environments here. I have informally SLAs of 10 minutes of so from problem report to a fix being deployed to production. If, while debugging, I run into code that is hard to understand because it violates the norms, the author gets woken up immediately and given the problem. if someone wants to screw around building code empires in a live system, they get the calls at 2am.
As for passing the hours... most of my team works 12+ hours/day. They have 3 monitors each, and several compute farms available on demand. It isn't that hard to get a code review request over IM and review the work while your current stuff is running. I trust most code will "work," but crap code will slow down the next person dealing with the code. It's as simple as that.
For example, yesterday I got to review something like:
def foo( bar=None ): ... ... ...
baz = bar and f(bar)
if not bar or baz(a):
Ugly code because the debugging person has to check how bar and baz are related in the conditional expression. So, "if baz and baz(a)" is the suggestion, and the nicer implementation gets resubmitted a few minutes later. No muss, no fuss: the codebase gets a little better and easier to understand.
"What happens when I leave? Nothing. We have 100+ programmers with almost identical style: they enforce keeping the codebase clean and consistent"
So you have no need to check for compliance, since everybody's style is identical, right? There are actually following a standard established by their employer. Following orders isn't the same as approving of it. In any company, there are those who have the power to change policy sometimes at lower levels, sometimes at higher levels.
As was clearly explained in prior comments, we check all the time. You write your code, you announce you're ready for review, people look at it and comment. If you know what you're doing, you find a good reviewer. There are no orders and policy beyond the "write code so good everyone else loves it." You have a better idiom or style? Defend it well and we will adopt it (only happens 2% of the time though - your senior coworkers have written 1M lines of code each and seen the problems you are going to bring.)
Simple, readable, concrete, idiomatic, with good unittests, is the starting point. If you feel the need to be a lone-genius code cowboy, go live in the wild with codecows: it's unlikely you have much to contribute in the high-value areas.
What fits on a page is really quite simple. Typesetters, etc, have decent rules of thumb about line length, font size, and easy of right-to-left tracking after hitting the end of a line. Somewhere around 140 characters is reasonable for a modern computer. 500 chars is not.
What happens when I leave? Nothing. We have 100+ programmers with almost identical style: they enforce keeping the codebase clean and consistent. Law firms, engineering firms, architectural firms, etc, know how to do this. It's amazing some programming shops do not think this is a basic minimum when it comes to professional product.
I don't even know what you mean by "program correctness." Formal methods? Nailing the spec? Passing the unittests? Doing what the users expect? Selling well? I do know that consistent, understandable, well-crafted code is required for anything more than throwaway projects.
Yes, I'm anal, in the same way that all good professionals are anal.
Once the functions do exactly what their names imply, the code is completely idiomatic, there is zero fat, and everything fits nicely on the page, program correctness becomes much easier to discuss.
So easy, in fact, that poor programmers almost never get to the point of being able to deploy crap into production.
A stock photo firm is going to have a hard time convincing anyone that they had "no reason to believe." They deal with copyright every day, and had better have processes in place to handle disputes fairly.
At the least, the copyright owner should consult a lawyer and consider chucking a DMCA takedown notice at them to wake them up a bit.
Agreed. The definition of a good HR person is soft skills and zero technical/professional talent (else they'd be doing something more useful and highly paying.) Give them rope, and they'll propose people like themselves: pleasant and unproductive.
Although, I wouldn't hire a person I wouldn't be willing to eat lunch with: too much lack of mutual ground makes for high risk.
Hmm, a lot of different programming models are optimal because there are a lot of different business models.
Independent, decent programmers works great for the "grip it and flip it" model of getting software out the door.
I've got 10 million lines of production code, and I want every single change to make that codebase better, not worse. So, yes, you check in a while loop when it should be a for loop, at least two people are going to tell you to fix it before it's considered for production. I bitch about poor function names, bad idioms, pointless abstractions, code that rolls past 140 columns or so: don't leave crap that slows down the next person.
Oh, and each programmer gets 30 or so square feet of workspace, so they have 30 people within yelling distance if they need help while writing the code. Feels like CS-lab, but with rich programmers :)
That's why we don't let our HR department do anything more than post ads, collect resumes, run background checks, type up offer letters, deal with lawyers, and handle workplace issues.
If you let these people get their well-meaning tentacles into your business, you are screwed. These people are the code-monkey version of management: willfully proud of knowing nothing about the actual business needs, and inordinately satisfied with their mad HR skills. Only thing worse than an HR "specialist" is an MBA who works on his MBA skillz rather than learning the business he is being paid to support.
We flushed out a lot of the middle-management parasites twenty years ago. Now they seem to be back with new job titles.
So, I might do well if:
1) I can actually communicate with the people that are paying me.
2) I can write code that doesn't suck.
3) I actually understand the business needs for the code I'm writing.
Wow. I'll be much more effective now. Thanks.
To be fair, someone should have mentioned Statutory Invention Registration and file-and-abandon.
There, we are done.
What do we do to protect the police from rantings of ignorant bloggers?
I know! I know! We fire or jail the corrupt, abusive, and incompetent police. Then we are left with a good police force.
It's quite simple, really.
Perhaps its because no one else is making retarded assumptions.
Not everyone just out right assumes that cops are bad and that bloggers are just perfect angles.
Right, because those cops invaded a blogger's home and took his stuff. The blogger, otoh, used nasty words. Guess it's a draw.
Luckily, the Bill of Rights (amendments 1 and 4) weighs in the argument pretty heavily on the "you are moron" question.
Are you aiming for a prize in
a) stupidest analogy ever, or
b) I have rights because others have might, or
c) the world is a confusing place, let's bet on random things, or
d) you're a child molester and will be raped (just saying, I think about this stuff a lot.)
Please resubmit your essay with your competition category clearly stated.
We work hand-in-hand with google and push to get as much content on there for free as possible.
Good for you.
I've seen this happen a hundred times: a tech innovation comes along and disrupts a cozy business model.
The immediate response is to fight it, but the tech improvement gets cheaper every year: no matter how you fight, the tech gets cheaper and better every year. Eventually, you find yourself proposing absurdities like hitting consumers with $100K/song for copyright violations.
The more balanced response is to look at what your own business is, and decide how to leverage the free external tech innovations. E.g. New York Times is supposed to be the paper of record: so provide all your old content for free, and charge new content for a few weeks. There, problem solved. Oh, except now you claim to be the Lexis/Nexis of reporting, so better be able to able to back that claim up. Ah, you claim it's your OpEd guys that are the value-add? Sorry, their columns are all over the blogs under fair-use within hours of being published - why do pundits even need a newspaper?
Ben Stein might have been useful in the dark-ages, but now he's just an angry man yelling at the clouds.
Cluebat for newspapers: serve your community in realtime and sell ads to cover costs. Make it easy for users to read your stuff.
"IT job" covers a lot of space.
If it's "code monkey," you have a problem if you are older: you just cost more and are higher risk: simply old-cog versus new-cog.
If it's an intellectually challenging role, then age hardly matters. Getting the job done is what counts and that's what people pay for.
So, take a breath, take a step back, and ask yourself which of the two categories you aim to be in. If you're not sure, here's one question to help you decide: "what's a closure?"
Heck, at the higher levels, academic credentials become unimportant: understanding of the field, real achievements, etc, because the critical factors.
It's less than clear that carbon on the ocean's floor is just removed from the system. We know crabs eat sunk dead whales, and we know we have a lot of knowledge gaps about deep ocean-floor ecology (heck, we only found out about thermal vent ecologies twenty years ago.)
So, we try the next experiment: seed iron and fine silica - maybe that works in getting the diatoms crunchy enough that they survive the sink to the floor.
Yeah, my Unicomp Model M basically forced a move to a bigger apartment (either that or a divorce.)
I have one at work too, but burp-gun keyboard noise is the least of anyone's problems on a trading floor.
You haven't made any technical points. We aren't laughing with you, we're laughing at you.
Are you the laughingstock hedge fund Tom Hudson, or the laughingstock Tom Hudson CS PhD? Be happy - most people can't even do comedy well.
Lattes? Never made or drank one, never will.
Glad you're so open to new experiences. Get back to your 7-11 counter and stop bothering the intelligent people.
I've always wondered what a troll looks like in the open ocean. More sad than interesting, but you do make funny splashies as you drown.
"interesting", for values of "interesting == 0".
Normal people use quotation marks for a reason. You seem to use them like little girls use hearts instead of dots.
I don't really understand your passive-aggressive attitude. It's perfectly fine to be second-rate. We, as a society, need people like you to teach XML, make our lattes, and mow the lawn. Work hard, go home, drink a domestic beer, and be thankful for your $50K/year.