if you think for a second that we haven't manipulated plants and animals for thousands of years, you're being naive.
GMO != selective breeding. GMO == advanced techniques for inserting new DNA directly into genomes. For example, fish genes into plants. That kind of thing doesn't happen in selective breeding, and we have only been doing it for a few decades.
No pun intended. Homeopathy and the anti-GMO campaign don't belong in the same bucket. Homeopathy works on the placebo effect. Yes indeedy, that's pseudocience if you believe in it. It "works for that guy" much like prayer. OTOH, running a massive experiment on all of humanity by GMOing foods is more anti-science to me. There is no way to have a control group. Just like drugs that get onto the market and they discover that 1 out of a million people get heart attacks from the drug. There was no way to test that drug properly before releasing it. Likewise, there is no way to test the long-term effects of GMOs on large populations before releasing them. The fact that some of us would rather be in the control group doesn't make us anti-science. It makes us skeptical and that's good. TFA --> recycling bin.
But if developers are constantly writing slight variations on the same 500 lines of C, why not encapsulate it?
Sure, no problem with that. After all I just typed that into a text area in a web browser and hit send. There were probably *millions* of lines of encapsulated code in that one instant. The difference is that I'm not pretending that hitting "Submit" is the same as writing a web browser, a network stack, router firmware, etc. I didn't solve any problems. Those guys did.
Excess coders are not something I worry about. Why? Same reason performing musicians don't worry about little Timmy tooting on a recorder in 2nd grade. Odds are Timmy will get frustrated just like I did when I tried to play that damned thing. Even if Timmy has "talent", odds are he won't be able to make money at it. Even if he makes money at it, odds are it won't hurt the other players.
I think coding is a lot like music in that regard. Fine, teach "coding appreciation" and have coding classes just like you have music appreciation and music classes. Most people will suck at it, only a few will make money, and of that subset only a few will be noteworthy.
Diagramming sentences is a technique that was taught to us in private school, which hewed to that and other ancient tactics such as the Palmer penmanship method. I wonder if any of the public school students were exposed to it. Anyway, most people would rather write sentences than diagram them despite the fact that it's more graphical. There are a few tasks for which visual programming is the proper approach such as creating dialog boxes for Windows apps, or WYSIWYG web development tools. When it makes sense, people use it. When it doesn't, they don't.
If you did everything graphically, you'd still get syntax errors; they would just be graphical.
BTW, diagramming in elementary school had an interesting effect on me. Years later when I was introduced to parse trees, they were like old friends. Now as an exercise, diagram all the sentences in this post and make it look nice and pretty with slanted lines and things.
That's OK, Big Pharma knows what the audience really wants. Beta pills for everybody, at 10X the price. Really. We did market research. That's what the audience wants.
I don't know if they have it set up to track user IDs, but there were 89 registered users shortly after I reserved my userid there. It'd rock to have a 2-digit ID on the new site.
It'll be interesting to see which is harder: Making Slash work in a modern environment, or making PHP BB have all the features that Slashdot users expect.
IMHO, the project needs an environment-neutral spec for what Slashdot requires, as well as the improvements that users have really been looking for (e.g., Unicode). That way they can clean-room it and have something that really is better, regardless of what the underlying language/framework/system is.
I expect endless debates about the merits or lack thereof of various combinations of languages, DB back-ends, front-ends, and business models. It's healthy as long as the community picks something and re-forms around it. Nothing will be perfect, but anything will be better than runaway corporate control.
No, turn the Olympics into a reality show format, stretched out over a season. It'll make a lot more money that way. That's a much better analogy for Slashdot Beta.
"Eternal September" has devolved even further, into "Eternal Black Friday".
The underground could use these... to build a new Slashdot. To escape from tyranny. To communicate in secret. To plan our escape. To fight for freedom. Resist! And BUCK THE FETA.
May "olives and feta" be our code for "fuck the beta" going forward. Like, you're in a bar in Palo Alto and somebody mentions how their company is redesigning their site and you go, "so it's olives and feta" and they either know what you're talking about or they don't.
The first thing that comes to mind is illegal immigrants. Some other people on this thread have mentioned criminal records. Then there's welfare. You start to lose benefits if you have too much money in the bank. It's a pathetic amount like $2000. There's no way you can dig yourself out of the welfare trap with $2000 if you lose your $500/mo EBT because of that. So. Cash the check, buy some bling. That's your real savings. The poor who do this are acting as perfectly rational economic actors. If you want to at least partially kill this industry, don't start using assets as a test for benefits until they have enough savings to last them 2 years on their own, and then taper the benefits instead of ending them all at once. In fact, the benefits need to be constructed in such a way that obtaining a job or getting a raise doesn't result in a reduction to net income. That would go a long way towards getting people off welfare programs.
I don't see how any programmer would think that
on
Code Is Not Literature
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't see how any programmer would think code was literature, except perhaps highly technical literature. You read novels from beginning to end. You read code on an as-needed basis. You might only read the header of a library. In fact I've seen good libraries where the only docs I read were long comments in the header file. If you want to understand a system you might start with main() or your language's equivalent and find some kind of dispatch function with calls to things like ResizeWindow which is *boring* and calls to things like DetectThief which is *interesting* so you drill down into the DetectThief function and find out where it gets the data and how it decides the user might be a thief. That might only be a few thousands lines that you've looked at. The other 30k lines of GUI or sorting, or options of writing PDF reports... blah, it might not be interesting to you... unless you're a font and layout geek and the reports did something interesting with fonts and/or layouts. Then you might only read that part.
Likewise, if it crashes you'll pull it up in the debugger and read parts of the functions on the stack that lead to the crash. Aha! The contract called for the caller to not pass any NULL pointers, and they passed one. Fix. Commit. You had a *reason* for reading that code.
x86 micro-instructions? Define "code". DNA. There ya' go.
Re:NFL coaches work obsessively, too but...
on
What Makes a Genius?
·
· Score: 1
That must be Albert's younger brother who never bothered with physics. He just said, "Yes, that Einstein" in bars to get women. Who's the genius now, eh?
10 years ago, you just whipped out your Visual Studio when you needed a client application, but not anymore.
No. I whipped out Visual Studio and created a header called plat.h and a source called plat.c. There were no more than 2000 lines devoted to platform issues, vs. something like 40k for the whole thing at its largest point. They allowed my application to run on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. And yes, it did threads and networking! It used pthreads on Windows, and it worked very well. Eventually, the kernel module component (yes, kernel module) ran on all 3 systems in kernel mode. The plat.h/plat.c business never got out of hand. It was pretty manageable. At some point, we interviewed a manager who wanted us to switch to Eclipse, and couldn't understand how I could do what I did without using Java. Fortunately he was not hired.
This. We may find that the current online advertising model is like the Soviet revolution. If the hosting site and the ad scripts start working in concert, it might be like a crackdown by hardliners. Unlike a totalitarian regime, migration from your site is usually not that difficult. You'll lose the users. Maybe then commercial sites will realize that they have to go back to something more like the old print media model. You couldn't just blindly turn over newspaper pages to 3rd parties. Advertisers had to trust things like circulation figures and demographics. It was a far less sophisticated analytic. Publishers will have to be trustworthy enough for advertisers to trust *publisher* analytics. If the New York Times really wanted to be innovative, they are the kind of company that could do this. That, along with getting rid of user registration would really shake up the industry. I think it'd be a clear winner as long as the publisher didn't do the same kind of scripted nasties that ad networks currently do.
Wouldn't you love to be able to browse a high quality site, knowing that the ads aren't going to ass-rape your system? Aside from that, wouldn't it be nice to look at page archives 30 years from now and see period ads. You can look at magazines from 100 years ago and get insights into the culture, and develop an appreciation for the history of strong brands like Coca Cola, or oddities like patent medicines with radium in them. Future historians will look at the last 20 years as if the tape of our commercial activities had been erased.
Slashdot Mirror
I can describe that insanity in 140 characters or less.
if you think for a second that we haven't manipulated plants and animals for thousands of years, you're being naive.
GMO != selective breeding. GMO == advanced techniques for inserting new DNA directly into genomes. For example, fish genes into plants. That kind of thing doesn't happen in selective breeding, and we have only been doing it for a few decades.
No pun intended. Homeopathy and the anti-GMO campaign don't belong in the same bucket. Homeopathy works on the placebo effect. Yes indeedy, that's pseudocience if you believe in it. It "works for that guy" much like prayer. OTOH, running a massive experiment on all of humanity by GMOing foods is more anti-science to me. There is no way to have a control group. Just like drugs that get onto the market and they discover that 1 out of a million people get heart attacks from the drug. There was no way to test that drug properly before releasing it. Likewise, there is no way to test the long-term effects of GMOs on large populations before releasing them. The fact that some of us would rather be in the control group doesn't make us anti-science. It makes us skeptical and that's good. TFA --> recycling bin.
George Lucas's fault. He thought he could do something with whales and time travel in the Star Wars franchise, and this is the result.
The A-10 will be replaced with the military equivalent of Beta. I wish I were joking.
Yes. If you were a Real Programmer (TM) you'd focus your mind and flip bits on the motherboard.
Did they mean "2nd biggest"?
No, since it's all about the combined surface area of screens they meant is 2d.
But if developers are constantly writing slight variations on the same 500 lines of C, why not encapsulate it?
Sure, no problem with that. After all I just typed that into a text area in a web browser and hit send. There were probably *millions* of lines of encapsulated code in that one instant. The difference is that I'm not pretending that hitting "Submit" is the same as writing a web browser, a network stack, router firmware, etc. I didn't solve any problems. Those guys did.
Excess coders are not something I worry about. Why? Same reason performing musicians don't worry about little Timmy tooting on a recorder in 2nd grade. Odds are Timmy will get frustrated just like I did when I tried to play that damned thing. Even if Timmy has "talent", odds are he won't be able to make money at it. Even if he makes money at it, odds are it won't hurt the other players.
I think coding is a lot like music in that regard. Fine, teach "coding appreciation" and have coding classes just like you have music appreciation and music classes. Most people will suck at it, only a few will make money, and of that subset only a few will be noteworthy.
Diagramming sentences is a technique that was taught to us in private school, which hewed to that and other ancient tactics such as the Palmer penmanship method. I wonder if any of the public school students were exposed to it. Anyway, most people would rather write sentences than diagram them despite the fact that it's more graphical. There are a few tasks for which visual programming is the proper approach such as creating dialog boxes for Windows apps, or WYSIWYG web development tools. When it makes sense, people use it. When it doesn't, they don't.
If you did everything graphically, you'd still get syntax errors; they would just be graphical.
BTW, diagramming in elementary school had an interesting effect on me. Years later when I was introduced to parse trees, they were like old friends. Now as an exercise, diagram all the sentences in this post and make it look nice and pretty with slanted lines and things.
That's OK, Big Pharma knows what the audience really wants. Beta pills for everybody, at 10X the price. Really. We did market research. That's what the audience wants.
I don't know if they have it set up to track user IDs, but there were 89 registered users shortly after I reserved my userid there. It'd rock to have a 2-digit ID on the new site.
It'll be interesting to see which is harder: Making Slash work in a modern environment, or making PHP BB have all the features that Slashdot users expect.
IMHO, the project needs an environment-neutral spec for what Slashdot requires, as well as the improvements that users have really been looking for (e.g., Unicode). That way they can clean-room it and have something that really is better, regardless of what the underlying language/framework/system is.
I expect endless debates about the merits or lack thereof of various combinations of languages, DB back-ends, front-ends, and business models. It's healthy as long as the community picks something and re-forms around it. Nothing will be perfect, but anything will be better than runaway corporate control.
No, turn the Olympics into a reality show format, stretched out over a season. It'll make a lot more money that way. That's a much better analogy for Slashdot Beta.
"Eternal September" has devolved even further, into "Eternal Black Friday".
The underground could use these... to build a new Slashdot. To escape from tyranny. To communicate in secret. To plan our escape. To fight for freedom. Resist! And BUCK THE FETA.
May "olives and feta" be our code for "fuck the beta" going forward. Like, you're in a bar in Palo Alto and somebody mentions how their company is redesigning their site and you go, "so it's olives and feta" and they either know what you're talking about or they don't.
If you think this contributor won't pack up and leave when things get sucky, just hop on over to my Flickr page and note the date of my last picture.
Lotsa luck getting that ad revenue without contributors. News aggs plastered with ads are a dime a dozen. You're Digg4ing your grave.
12 million light years away can be construed as 'nearby' on some scales.
I'm going to check that out. AFK, BRB.
The first thing that comes to mind is illegal immigrants. Some other people on this thread have mentioned criminal records. Then there's welfare. You start to lose benefits if you have too much money in the bank. It's a pathetic amount like $2000. There's no way you can dig yourself out of the welfare trap with $2000 if you lose your $500/mo EBT because of that. So. Cash the check, buy some bling. That's your real savings. The poor who do this are acting as perfectly rational economic actors. If you want to at least partially kill this industry, don't start using assets as a test for benefits until they have enough savings to last them 2 years on their own, and then taper the benefits instead of ending them all at once. In fact, the benefits need to be constructed in such a way that obtaining a job or getting a raise doesn't result in a reduction to net income. That would go a long way towards getting people off welfare programs.
I don't see how any programmer would think code was literature, except perhaps highly technical literature. You read novels from beginning to end. You read code on an as-needed basis. You might only read the header of a library. In fact I've seen good libraries where the only docs I read were long comments in the header file. If you want to understand a system you might start with main() or your language's equivalent and find some kind of dispatch function with calls to things like ResizeWindow which is *boring* and calls to things like DetectThief which is *interesting* so you drill down into the DetectThief function and find out where it gets the data and how it decides the user might be a thief. That might only be a few thousands lines that you've looked at. The other 30k lines of GUI or sorting, or options of writing PDF reports... blah, it might not be interesting to you... unless you're a font and layout geek and the reports did something interesting with fonts and/or layouts. Then you might only read that part.
Likewise, if it crashes you'll pull it up in the debugger and read parts of the functions on the stack that lead to the crash. Aha! The contract called for the caller to not pass any NULL pointers, and they passed one. Fix. Commit. You had a *reason* for reading that code.
He's a racist troll. He needs help. You should have googled it for him.
x86 micro-instructions? Define "code". DNA. There ya' go.
That must be Albert's younger brother who never bothered with physics. He just said, "Yes, that Einstein" in bars to get women. Who's the genius now, eh?
10 years ago, you just whipped out your Visual Studio when you needed a client application, but not anymore.
No. I whipped out Visual Studio and created a header called plat.h and a source called plat.c. There were no more than 2000 lines devoted to platform issues, vs. something like 40k for the whole thing at its largest point. They allowed my application to run on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. And yes, it did threads and networking! It used pthreads on Windows, and it worked very well. Eventually, the kernel module component (yes, kernel module) ran on all 3 systems in kernel mode. The plat.h/plat.c business never got out of hand. It was pretty manageable. At some point, we interviewed a manager who wanted us to switch to Eclipse, and couldn't understand how I could do what I did without using Java. Fortunately he was not hired.
This. We may find that the current online advertising model is like the Soviet revolution. If the hosting site and the ad scripts start working in concert, it might be like a crackdown by hardliners. Unlike a totalitarian regime, migration from your site is usually not that difficult. You'll lose the users. Maybe then commercial sites will realize that they have to go back to something more like the old print media model. You couldn't just blindly turn over newspaper pages to 3rd parties. Advertisers had to trust things like circulation figures and demographics. It was a far less sophisticated analytic. Publishers will have to be trustworthy enough for advertisers to trust *publisher* analytics. If the New York Times really wanted to be innovative, they are the kind of company that could do this. That, along with getting rid of user registration would really shake up the industry. I think it'd be a clear winner as long as the publisher didn't do the same kind of scripted nasties that ad networks currently do.
Wouldn't you love to be able to browse a high quality site, knowing that the ads aren't going to ass-rape your system? Aside from that, wouldn't it be nice to look at page archives 30 years from now and see period ads. You can look at magazines from 100 years ago and get insights into the culture, and develop an appreciation for the history of strong brands like Coca Cola, or oddities like patent medicines with radium in them. Future historians will look at the last 20 years as if the tape of our commercial activities had been erased.