Fire him. He'll start telling all his other job prospects how stupid your code was, and then he'll magically discover that he either doesn't get hired because he's a whiny bitch or that only other assholes will hire him, and then poverty, misery, or both will mop up the rest of his attitude by serving as a gentle nudge to stfu and code.
I know this will sound odd coming from the guy who helped popularize games on Linux w/ the Doom & Quake ports, but I actually want more text-based games like nethack.
I've been playing nethack constantly for about 20 years now, and I've only won a few dozen times. I just won again as a monk last night, and it was still concentrated awesome. I think a big part of its excellence is that it doesn't have pretty graphics to lean on, so it was forced to be seriously fucking fun and different every time. You just don't find games with that amount of procedurally generated, radically different gameplay every time you play them anymore. I also love that it's turn based because it actually lets me play the game faster the better I get at it, and I type 100wpm, which means I get a shit-ton more enjoyment out of it than I can out of most graphically-intensive real-time games. I also love that I can play it entirely with the keyboard without ever having to slow myself down with a mouse. I also love that I can read the source code, scour the nethack wiki, and still be challenged every time I play it. Plus, every time someone catches me playing it, they think I'm hard at work on something technical.:)
Nethack is really a masterwork of game design, and I'd love to play more masterwork text-based RPG's as well as other genres like strategy.
I think like most people, I use Linux only on servers and over ssh, so it's really the format I want the game in. The fancy graphics I want are coloured, extended-ASCII graphics. That's plenty, thanks!
Hostess has been a major arms dealer in the war against diabetes in the US. It's great to see them finally fail.
Next up: McDonalds? Dare we dream?
The US gov't should be heavily taxing food this unhealthy or subsidizing food that is healthy. Neither of these is happening, and it's fucking ridiculous.
Mitt's a devout Mormon. When they say they're gonna pray for someone, they mean it, and it's not a "fuck you". Prayer is basically self-programming. It means the supplicant is probably going to do things consciously or unconsciously to help out with whatever he's praying for.
I'm not religious, but the bitterness on here is really disheartening. It was an ugly process, but I think we came out the other side of these elections a lot better off on several fronts, and I'm a little more hopeful for the future.
Please switch! Closed source / binary ABI focused ecosystems do so well when you switch processors!
Between this brilliant idea and the Win 8 faceplant, I've never seen a stronger opportunity for Linux (or Android) to have another credible shot at the desktop. Linux can switch to ARM easily. OSX and Windows can't.
Arrogant nerds won't listen to you unless you're either on par or further up the nerd hierarchy than they are. You've got to demonstrate your powerful nerd skills to do this. One opportunity to prove your nerd credentials is to do something the arrogant nerd states emphatically can't be done, and then you do it, but just throwing down with the right nerd track record can sometimes work, too.
After you've demonstrated your nerd qualifications, then you need to deliver a *withering* attack and follow up with a play-by-play of their arrogance at the start of the argument, because if you don't, by then, they will have forgotten their crime, as they're generally only dimly aware of the arrogant affectations of their delivery.
But it's a long shot even if you pull this off. For a lot of them, it's just too late. They didn't get the right parenting to temper their arrogance, and without great parenting, you generally don't get great kids.
This is obviously hampered by the fact that good engineers are exceedingly rare, and all kinds of bad behaviours are tolerated in order to secure their continued employment.
Go visit his site, watch the videos. He's a smart, well-spoken guy, and he's a coder. Watch the debate video in particular, and the interview on Greater Boston covering the debate:
The two party candidates talked over him like he wasn't there. It was incredibly disrespectful, yet he handled it with aplomb, and all his contributions to the debate were valuable and substantive. He doesn't deserve this cynical reception on slashdot. He's a geek reaching out. This is an opportunity for us to make a political difference, and we're being a bunch of putzes.
This is a guy with 7% for zero corporate expenditures, and he's not a professional, two-party politician. This means he has promise as a candidate and could go far. Let's get his back.
The reason they won't go open source is that it exposes them to patent lawsuits, frivolous or otherwise.
There will come a time when we either have reformed patent law, or we have a widely accepted binary ABI like x86 or arm7 but for GPU's, and that'll be the end of this nonsense with the closed source drivers.
I'm really curious about one thing. How do you name binary numbers in English.
I taught them "one + one = ten". It was just easier, because it looked like ten, and that's what they knew to call it. Also "ten" conveys that something special has happened in that second digit.
I believe everyone can code, but obviously some people are going to be intrinsically better at it.
A few weeks ago, in less than half an hour, I taught about 20 2nd grade kids (generally 7-8 years old) how to count in binary as well as add any length of binary number.
Wondering whether I could beat that, I repeated the feat last week by teaching about 20 1st grade kids (6-7 years old) exactly the same thing. The 1st graders had more trouble keeping their attention than the 2nd graders, but they were all the more enthusiastic to learn.
In case you're wondering how to teach kids of an arbitrarily young age how to learn binary, here was how I did it in three rounds of kids raising their hands to answer my questions:
1. Raise your hand if you like to play video games. 2. How many of you would like to make a video game? 3. Who would like to know the three secrets to making a great video game?
By the third question, I think I could have staged a coup with the eager little mobs.
I've got my eyes on a local pre-school next.
That came out wrong.
PS. Teaching kids how to count and do math in binary is way, way easier than teaching them how to do it in decimal. It should come first IMHO.
Rewrite it from scratch using the spaghetti code version to run correctness tests to verify you haven't changed the behaviour.
200k lines is about how large the Doom codebase was, and it wasn't uncommon for John Carmack to rewrite most of his game engine in a couple of weeks, a week, or even a weekend when he felt it wasn't going on a good path.
Seeing as how 1/3 of the earth is made of iron and we've assuredly been rained upon by some iron meteorites that probably popped somewhere in the atmosphere, something tells me that iron-rich moments in the ocean's history have not been unknown. Does the fossil record have anything to say on the subject?
I'd probably set up a website where all these games can be found in a nice, attractive setting that makes them look like the museum pieces they should be- nicely lit, oak frames, black velvet, that sort of thing. Use all procedural textures for the wood grain, velvet, etc, so that they remain resolution independent and always look delish. Get the credits engraved in said wood next to every piece of framed box art, and inlay those credits with gold.
Look for the dudes who did the work, the actual developers. And then approach the authors and explain that the site is going to be organized from top to bottom by which games have well-maintained source and which don't. Instead of rating them numerically, you'll just do it by turning the knobs on the degeneration on the procedural textures, so that the wood looks all rotted out, the inlay half-flaked away and over everything there's a thick patina of dust. So still looking classy but in an increasingly forgotten way.
Then put a classy old collection cup somewhere in the frame there. If clicked on, it'll prompt for donation amount and then animate a corresponding number of coins that make a satisfying clinky sound and animation as they drop into the collection box, and then all the collections are split according to ranking. And you can donate directly to games by dropping coins directly into little miniature collection boxes right next to the lovely framed pictures with the lovely credits. And they'll be sent to the IP owners. If the IP owners are confirmed to be split the proceeds with the actual authors, you'll give that picture extra sexy lighting, finer woodwork for the frame, a richer, lusher, redder velvet.
Give it a nice, pretentious name like The Gallery Eternal.
It seems extremely well-designed and robust to me, much more so than traditional currencies. It also seems like an incredibly valuable hedge against sovereign-backed currencies face-planting because a country goes into the shitter or because the government instantiates money out of thin air.
I'm sure they'll be completely unable to compensate for that. For instance, I can't imagine them actually turning someone sideways for a second X-ray picture.
The Dept of Education isn't working. Social Security is bankrupt. The NIH is redundant. Shutting them down saves a lot of money that can be directed elsewhere that it is urgently needed. This is how budgets used to be balanced back before people instantiated money out of thin air.
He does not oppose the Civil Rights Act. He said it didn't work:
"[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife."
He is not a racist. His publication over the history of its existence had exactly one racist comment in there that he didn't write, and that he doesn't endorse.
From Wikipedia on Paul's stance on the gold standard: He opposes dependency on paper fiat money, but also says that there "were some shortcomings of the gold standard of the 19th century... because it was a fixed price and caused confusion." He argues that hard money, such as backed by gold or silver, would prevent monetary inflation (and, thus, would inhibit price inflation), but adds, "I wouldn't exactly go back on the gold standard but I would legalize the constitution where gold and silver should and could be legal tender, which would restrain the Federal Government from spending and then turning that over to the Federal Reserve and letting the Federal Reserve print the money."
On abortion, he believes states should decide, not the federal government, which means costs go up because you need a flight out of Mississippi. That sucks, and it definitely is going to create a huge financial burden and lower the odds the poor will leave the state for an abortion, but on the flip side, if we like him had watched people put "breathing, crying 2.5lb babies into buckets to die", I think we might have slightly different views on abortion as well. It's not an easy black and white subject. There's a fuzzy point in there where you have to decide when is too old to kill.
I like Ron Paul because he's smarter and less afraid of speaking his mind than other candidates. He's less fake, and that's a big deal. However, his proposals are so big and extreme that they would never be passed in Congress. I'd prefer Ron Paul stage a coup and overthrow the US so that he can dictate by fiat. Being elected President would just set the stage for the most dramatic face-plant on campaign promises in the history of same.
Slashdot Mirror
Suicidal tendencies might explain some of the big risks he took.
Fire him. He'll start telling all his other job prospects how stupid your code was, and then he'll magically discover that he either doesn't get hired because he's a whiny bitch or that only other assholes will hire him, and then poverty, misery, or both will mop up the rest of his attitude by serving as a gentle nudge to stfu and code.
I know this will sound odd coming from the guy who helped popularize games on Linux w/ the Doom & Quake ports, but I actually want more text-based games like nethack.
I've been playing nethack constantly for about 20 years now, and I've only won a few dozen times. I just won again as a monk last night, and it was still concentrated awesome. I think a big part of its excellence is that it doesn't have pretty graphics to lean on, so it was forced to be seriously fucking fun and different every time. You just don't find games with that amount of procedurally generated, radically different gameplay every time you play them anymore. I also love that it's turn based because it actually lets me play the game faster the better I get at it, and I type 100wpm, which means I get a shit-ton more enjoyment out of it than I can out of most graphically-intensive real-time games. I also love that I can play it entirely with the keyboard without ever having to slow myself down with a mouse. I also love that I can read the source code, scour the nethack wiki, and still be challenged every time I play it. Plus, every time someone catches me playing it, they think I'm hard at work on something technical. :)
Nethack is really a masterwork of game design, and I'd love to play more masterwork text-based RPG's as well as other genres like strategy.
I think like most people, I use Linux only on servers and over ssh, so it's really the format I want the game in. The fancy graphics I want are coloured, extended-ASCII graphics. That's plenty, thanks!
Hostess has been a major arms dealer in the war against diabetes in the US. It's great to see them finally fail.
Next up: McDonalds? Dare we dream?
The US gov't should be heavily taxing food this unhealthy or subsidizing food that is healthy. Neither of these is happening, and it's fucking ridiculous.
Mitt's a devout Mormon. When they say they're gonna pray for someone, they mean it, and it's not a "fuck you". Prayer is basically self-programming. It means the supplicant is probably going to do things consciously or unconsciously to help out with whatever he's praying for.
I'm not religious, but the bitterness on here is really disheartening. It was an ugly process, but I think we came out the other side of these elections a lot better off on several fronts, and I'm a little more hopeful for the future.
Please switch! Closed source / binary ABI focused ecosystems do so well when you switch processors!
Between this brilliant idea and the Win 8 faceplant, I've never seen a stronger opportunity for Linux (or Android) to have another credible shot at the desktop. Linux can switch to ARM easily. OSX and Windows can't.
This is incredible! It's just like a terminal window, but SLOWER! Want!
Arrogant nerds won't listen to you unless you're either on par or further up the nerd hierarchy than they are. You've got to demonstrate your powerful nerd skills to do this. One opportunity to prove your nerd credentials is to do something the arrogant nerd states emphatically can't be done, and then you do it, but just throwing down with the right nerd track record can sometimes work, too.
After you've demonstrated your nerd qualifications, then you need to deliver a *withering* attack and follow up with a play-by-play of their arrogance at the start of the argument, because if you don't, by then, they will have forgotten their crime, as they're generally only dimly aware of the arrogant affectations of their delivery.
But it's a long shot even if you pull this off. For a lot of them, it's just too late. They didn't get the right parenting to temper their arrogance, and without great parenting, you generally don't get great kids.
This is obviously hampered by the fact that good engineers are exceedingly rare, and all kinds of bad behaviours are tolerated in order to secure their continued employment.
Works for me fine on Mac OS (10.7.5) Firefox (16.0.1).
Part 2 is even more awesomer than Part 1.
Thanks so much, Eben, for your time, service, and wisdom!
Go visit his site, watch the videos. He's a smart, well-spoken guy, and he's a coder. Watch the debate video in particular, and the interview on Greater Boston covering the debate:
http://www.fishmanforcongress.com/video
The two party candidates talked over him like he wasn't there. It was incredibly disrespectful, yet he handled it with aplomb, and all his contributions to the debate were valuable and substantive. He doesn't deserve this cynical reception on slashdot. He's a geek reaching out. This is an opportunity for us to make a political difference, and we're being a bunch of putzes.
This is a guy with 7% for zero corporate expenditures, and he's not a professional, two-party politician. This means he has promise as a candidate and could go far. Let's get his back.
The reason they won't go open source is that it exposes them to patent lawsuits, frivolous or otherwise.
There will come a time when we either have reformed patent law, or we have a widely accepted binary ABI like x86 or arm7 but for GPU's, and that'll be the end of this nonsense with the closed source drivers.
Same here. Awesome read. Refreshing to see such a high-profile geek who doesn't feel the need to douche it up in interviews.
Unfortunately for the counter-argument, every one of those examples can be replaced by simply visiting a website online that does the math for you.
Perhaps it's just a passive-aggressive way of laying off most of the company by firing them for writing malfunctioning code.
I'm really curious about one thing. How do you name binary numbers in English.
I taught them "one + one = ten". It was just easier, because it looked like ten, and that's what they knew to call it. Also "ten" conveys that something special has happened in that second digit.
I believe everyone can code, but obviously some people are going to be intrinsically better at it.
A few weeks ago, in less than half an hour, I taught about 20 2nd grade kids (generally 7-8 years old) how to count in binary as well as add any length of binary number.
Wondering whether I could beat that, I repeated the feat last week by teaching about 20 1st grade kids (6-7 years old) exactly the same thing. The 1st graders had more trouble keeping their attention than the 2nd graders, but they were all the more enthusiastic to learn.
In case you're wondering how to teach kids of an arbitrarily young age how to learn binary, here was how I did it in three rounds of kids raising their hands to answer my questions:
1. Raise your hand if you like to play video games.
2. How many of you would like to make a video game?
3. Who would like to know the three secrets to making a great video game?
By the third question, I think I could have staged a coup with the eager little mobs.
I've got my eyes on a local pre-school next.
That came out wrong.
PS. Teaching kids how to count and do math in binary is way, way easier than teaching them how to do it in decimal. It should come first IMHO.
Rewrite it from scratch using the spaghetti code version to run correctness tests to verify you haven't changed the behaviour.
200k lines is about how large the Doom codebase was, and it wasn't uncommon for John Carmack to rewrite most of his game engine in a couple of weeks, a week, or even a weekend when he felt it wasn't going on a good path.
Seeing as how 1/3 of the earth is made of iron and we've assuredly been rained upon by some iron meteorites that probably popped somewhere in the atmosphere, something tells me that iron-rich moments in the ocean's history have not been unknown. Does the fossil record have anything to say on the subject?
I'd probably set up a website where all these games can be found in a nice, attractive setting that makes them look like the museum pieces they should be- nicely lit, oak frames, black velvet, that sort of thing. Use all procedural textures for the wood grain, velvet, etc, so that they remain resolution independent and always look delish. Get the credits engraved in said wood next to every piece of framed box art, and inlay those credits with gold.
Look for the dudes who did the work, the actual developers. And then approach the authors and explain that the site is going to be organized from top to bottom by which games have well-maintained source and which don't. Instead of rating them numerically, you'll just do it by turning the knobs on the degeneration on the procedural textures, so that the wood looks all rotted out, the inlay half-flaked away and over everything there's a thick patina of dust. So still looking classy but in an increasingly forgotten way.
Then put a classy old collection cup somewhere in the frame there. If clicked on, it'll prompt for donation amount and then animate a corresponding number of coins that make a satisfying clinky sound and animation as they drop into the collection box, and then all the collections are split according to ranking. And you can donate directly to games by dropping coins directly into little miniature collection boxes right next to the lovely framed pictures with the lovely credits. And they'll be sent to the IP owners. If the IP owners are confirmed to be split the proceeds with the actual authors, you'll give that picture extra sexy lighting, finer woodwork for the frame, a richer, lusher, redder velvet.
Give it a nice, pretentious name like The Gallery Eternal.
People don't read, but they watch videos.
How is bitcoin deeply flawed?
It seems extremely well-designed and robust to me, much more so than traditional currencies. It also seems like an incredibly valuable hedge against sovereign-backed currencies face-planting because a country goes into the shitter or because the government instantiates money out of thin air.
I'm sure they'll be completely unable to compensate for that. For instance, I can't imagine them actually turning someone sideways for a second X-ray picture.
"to allow visitors and residents to get more out of their stay ..."
The Dept of Education isn't working. Social Security is bankrupt. The NIH is redundant. Shutting them down saves a lot of money that can be directed elsewhere that it is urgently needed. This is how budgets used to be balanced back before people instantiated money out of thin air.
He does not oppose the Civil Rights Act. He said it didn't work:
"[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife."
He is not a racist. His publication over the history of its existence had exactly one racist comment in there that he didn't write, and that he doesn't endorse.
From Wikipedia on Paul's stance on the gold standard: ... because it was a fixed price and caused confusion." He argues that hard money, such as backed by gold or silver, would prevent monetary inflation (and, thus, would inhibit price inflation), but adds, "I wouldn't exactly go back on the gold standard but I would legalize the constitution where gold and silver should and could be legal tender, which would restrain the Federal Government from spending and then turning that over to the Federal Reserve and letting the Federal Reserve print the money."
He opposes dependency on paper fiat money, but also says that there "were some shortcomings of the gold standard of the 19th century
On abortion, he believes states should decide, not the federal government, which means costs go up because you need a flight out of Mississippi. That sucks, and it definitely is going to create a huge financial burden and lower the odds the poor will leave the state for an abortion, but on the flip side, if we like him had watched people put "breathing, crying 2.5lb babies into buckets to die", I think we might have slightly different views on abortion as well. It's not an easy black and white subject. There's a fuzzy point in there where you have to decide when is too old to kill.
I like Ron Paul because he's smarter and less afraid of speaking his mind than other candidates. He's less fake, and that's a big deal. However, his proposals are so big and extreme that they would never be passed in Congress. I'd prefer Ron Paul stage a coup and overthrow the US so that he can dictate by fiat. Being elected President would just set the stage for the most dramatic face-plant on campaign promises in the history of same.