You know, your argument could be taken as an example of why people are such bad drivers, and why self driving cars can be safer. They don't get overconfident. You Know Sheep. You look at them and say, "Those sheep are all on the same side of the road, so they're not likely to run out into the middle. They're not a hazard." You keep on driving without slowing down or worrying about them. The computer doesn't have your overconfidence in your ability to predict what sheep will do. It says, "Large animals by the side of the road are a hazard." It slows down and is ready to stop the moment they do anything unexpected.
Most of the time, you'll be right. The sheep will just stand there and you'll drive past. You'll be right 99 times in a row. That gives you a false sense of security and makes you less prepared to respond when the 100th time, a sheep does something you didn't expect.
Editors for dynamically typed languages can only do very primitive checking. They don't know enough about your code. If you mistype a variable name, they can't tell because they don't know what symbols will be defined in the global scope. That isn't determined until runtime. If you mistype a method name, they can't tell because they don't know what type of object you're calling it on, so they don't know what methods are supposed to be there. That too is only defined at runtime. It's impossible for the editor to know whether the code is correct.
Editors for statically typed languages can do very sophisticated checking. If you mistype a variable or method name, they'll tell you instantly. Or if you pass the wrong number of arguments to a function. Or if you try to pass a value of the wrong type. Or if you assign a value of the wrong type to a variable. Or if you try to call a method on a reference that might be null. Or if you don't handle a checked exception. The editor knows lots more about your code, so it can do lots more for you.
The problem is that the dynamically typed code also has all those bugs. You get the same bugs you would in a statically typed language, plus a bunch of others on top.
There's no magic solution to get rid of all your bugs. Static typing won't do it. Automatic memory management won't do it. Unit testing won't do it. But each of those helps. They do catch a lot of bugs, and catch them sooner, and that means fewer bugs left in the end.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is so much anymore. Modern languages like Swift, Scala, Kotlin, etc. do a good job of being concise while still keeping full type safety. And that ends up making them faster to write. I also do a lot of Python programming, and spend way too much time running my code over and over just to discover typos and similar mistakes that my editor would have instantly highlighted for me if I'd been working in a statically typed language.
> They sure need them, because their Collectivism is killing them and their performance is pathetic.
By what measure? It looks to me like they're doing pretty well. For example, here's a list of countries ordered by average wages. Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium are all in the top ten.
Or how about per-capita GDP? Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark are all in the top 20. Norway (#6) is well ahead of the U.S. (#11).
Or what about life expectancy, that being something people really care about a lot? The U.S. is way down at #31. Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, and Finland are all higher.
You have to assume your servers will get hacked. It doesn't matter what software you're running. Someone will find a way in. Any competent developer starts with that assumption and designs around it. That's why you never ever EVER store sensitive data unencrypted! They're looking for someone to blame for their incompetence.
Wealth doesn't mean money. Wealth means things of inherent value. Money is just a bookkeeping tool for keeping track of wealth. If you create a valuable good, you've created wealth. If you increase the money supply, you just cause inflation so the (arbitrary) monetary value we attach to that good changes, but you don't create wealth.
Seems like there's an important lesson here. When you start dropping bombs, you're not just killing the people you drop them on. You have to assume you'll also kill some random people who happen to live there a few decades from now. So think really carefully before dropping bombs.
There's so many reasons you might have trouble accessing a website. It's not always censorship. One person says he can't access slashdot, and with nothing but that, we've got a discussion thread full of people denouncing India. Seriously?
Lots of other folks in India say it works fine for them. So it's not censorship, just one person having network problems. It happens. It's not a big deal.
Don't jump to conclusions. Take your time, get the facts. And seriously how did the slashdot editors let this through? They're totally not doing their job when they post rumors and wild speculation as if it were news.
You: "Hi, I'd like to make a dinner reservation for Friday at 6:30."
Restaurant employee: "Sure, let me pull up the calendar." (The computer identifies you by caller ID and notes you don't drink alcohol, so it's a bad idea to let you take up a table at their busiest time.) "I'm sorry, we don't have any free seats then. We do have openings at 5:30, or after 7."
I've occasionally been in positions where I didn't have enough work to keep me busy, and I hate it. It's more stressful than being overworked in some ways.
For example, I once started a new job, and almost immediately my supervisor went on vacation for a month. Before he left we went over the project I was going to be working on, and he figured I had everything I needed to get a good start on it while he was away. Well, I finished the whole project in two weeks. So I spent the next two weeks wandering the office and asking everyone, "Can I do anything to help you out? Can you give me something useful to do? Please?" Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.
This reminds me of the XKCD strip about free speech. Free speech means you have the right to say what you want. It doesn't mean anyone has to listen to you. It doesn't mean they can't think you're an asshole for saying it. It doesn't mean there won't be consequences.
This person exercised his right to say what he wanted, and I fully support him having that right. And lots of other people are exercising their right to think he's an asshole for saying it, and I fully support them having that right. No one's censoring him or trying to silence him. They're just expressing their own opinions, as they have the right to do.
I'd really like advice on this. I absolutely never want a video to autoplay. Period. NoScript seems to block most of them, but occasional sites still get through. Are there other tools I should look at?
This is purely a political decision, nothing to do with any legitimate concerns. If this were being pushed by the military, if they were raising issues about trans people serving, I would listen carefully to what they said and give their views appropriate weight. But that's not what's happening. They already studied the subject and concluded there were no serious problems with trans people serving. In fact, they were totally caught off guard by this announcement. When asked to comment on it, they just told reporters to go ask the white house. No surprise: the military doesn't make policy announcements on twitter. This is just Trump pandering to the religious right and trying to distract people from the health care debate and Russia investigation.
"We think movies are best seen in theaters, but unfortunately some viewers disagree. That's why we need an exclusive period to compel them to go to the theater anyway. We can't take the risk that some ignorant customers will choose to watch it the way they prefer instead of the way we want them to."
Solar is now one of the cheapest forms of energy available, and the price is still falling. So sure, any energy source is going to cost a lot to power the whole country. But compared to mining coal (which was considered "cheap energy" until a few years ago), putting up all those solar panels is a bargain. That's one of the reasons coal is dying. (Other reasons include wind and natural gas, which have also come way down in price and are now cheaper than coal.)
Not sure what you mean about the distribution system? Solar energy goes over the same electric grid as everything else.
Hire competent C developers and you should be good to go.
Anyone who is a competent C programmer understands the limitations of the language, knows there's a lot of truth in his criticisms, and uses C only when there are no other reasonable options. They understand that because they're competent C programmers.
You can write correct code in any language, or incorrect code in any language, but the choice of language makes a really big difference in how many errors your code has. C is a minefield of potential errors that don't exist in many other languages, and then it only gives you really primitive tools for avoiding those errors. You're responsible for manually doing all memory allocation, and then manually freeing that memory when it's done, and you don't even have access to destructors or try/finally constructs to do that more safely. All memory access is through pointers, which can then be used to access any memory location in the program's address space. That's insane. We've learned a lot about language design in the 40 years since C was created, and we know there are much better ways of doing these things.
At least use C++ instead of C. It's a superset of C, so it can do anything C can do. But it also provides tools for avoiding those problems. Use STL containers instead of arrays. Use references instead of pointers whenever possible. Use destructors to do your memory management via RAII. You will make fewer mistakes, and your code will contain fewer errors as a result.
I mean the guy posting this, not Amazon. He shorts a stock, then writes an article telling everyone they ought to sell that stock. He hopes some people will listen to him, in which case the price goes down, he immediately covers his short, and makes money. Nothing to do with Amazon really. It's a standard trick you can do with any stock. But only if you can get enough people to listen to you so it affects the stock price.
I meant high end systems, ones with positional head and hand tracking. If you include low end phone based systems, it's Cardboard by a huge margin. Both those don't compete with Rift.
The #1 selling VR system is PSVR. #2 is Vive. Rift simply isn't doing a good job of competing with them. That doesn't mean VR has a problem. It just means Oculus has a problem.
When the #3 player in a market isn't doing well, you can't conclude much about the market. How is the #1 player doing?
This is interesting, because it shows what Trump does when two of his core principles are in conflict. Jobs are good! Foreigners are evil! So which of those does he care about more? What does he do when creating jobs involves letting in foreigners? Now we know: "foreigners are evil" wins out. That's more important to him than creating jobs.
Which tells you that when he uses jobs to justify keeping out foreigners, he's probably just being a hypocrite. Not that that's a surprise.
I think what you really meant is, "Why not store that excess energy for future use?" Hydrogen is one way of doing it. Batteries are another. Pumped hydro is yet another. And the answer is that long term, that's absolutely the right thing to do. Several large battery storage systems have come online in California in the last year. But right now, there isn't enough grid storage to balance out all the fluctuations in supply and demand, so cases like this sometimes happen.
You're making some wrong assumptions about me based on things I didn't say. I want to encourage people to be more rational. I think that's a good goal to have, and I'm willing to work hard for it. I'm not worried about getting killed or my family starving as a result. Thankfully, I live in a country where that isn't a big concern. I do take the risk of finding I've wasted my time and failed to convince someone, and I'm fine with that risk.
But that's all irrelevant to what I was saying. Do you go into a discussion viewing the other people as enemies or opponents, people you are trying to "defeat"? That's what you indicated in your first post. You called them "opponents" and talked about wanting to hurt them. I don't see things that way. I'd much rather have an interesting conversation with them, one where we both learn something we didn't know before. I assume I might be wrong about some things, and I want to find out what those are. If I manipulate someone's emotions, I might convince them to agree with one of my false beliefs, and I might lose an opportunity to learn something. Both bad outcomes. I also lose a chance to encourage someone to be more rational. That's also a bad outcome. I think the world needs more rationality.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, your argument could be taken as an example of why people are such bad drivers, and why self driving cars can be safer. They don't get overconfident. You Know Sheep. You look at them and say, "Those sheep are all on the same side of the road, so they're not likely to run out into the middle. They're not a hazard." You keep on driving without slowing down or worrying about them. The computer doesn't have your overconfidence in your ability to predict what sheep will do. It says, "Large animals by the side of the road are a hazard." It slows down and is ready to stop the moment they do anything unexpected.
Most of the time, you'll be right. The sheep will just stand there and you'll drive past. You'll be right 99 times in a row. That gives you a false sense of security and makes you less prepared to respond when the 100th time, a sheep does something you didn't expect.
Editors for dynamically typed languages can only do very primitive checking. They don't know enough about your code. If you mistype a variable name, they can't tell because they don't know what symbols will be defined in the global scope. That isn't determined until runtime. If you mistype a method name, they can't tell because they don't know what type of object you're calling it on, so they don't know what methods are supposed to be there. That too is only defined at runtime. It's impossible for the editor to know whether the code is correct.
Editors for statically typed languages can do very sophisticated checking. If you mistype a variable or method name, they'll tell you instantly. Or if you pass the wrong number of arguments to a function. Or if you try to pass a value of the wrong type. Or if you assign a value of the wrong type to a variable. Or if you try to call a method on a reference that might be null. Or if you don't handle a checked exception. The editor knows lots more about your code, so it can do lots more for you.
The problem is that the dynamically typed code also has all those bugs. You get the same bugs you would in a statically typed language, plus a bunch of others on top.
There's no magic solution to get rid of all your bugs. Static typing won't do it. Automatic memory management won't do it. Unit testing won't do it. But each of those helps. They do catch a lot of bugs, and catch them sooner, and that means fewer bugs left in the end.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is so much anymore. Modern languages like Swift, Scala, Kotlin, etc. do a good job of being concise while still keeping full type safety. And that ends up making them faster to write. I also do a lot of Python programming, and spend way too much time running my code over and over just to discover typos and similar mistakes that my editor would have instantly highlighted for me if I'd been working in a statically typed language.
> They sure need them, because their Collectivism is killing them and their performance is pathetic.
By what measure? It looks to me like they're doing pretty well. For example, here's a list of countries ordered by average wages. Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium are all in the top ten.
Or how about per-capita GDP? Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark are all in the top 20. Norway (#6) is well ahead of the U.S. (#11).
Or what about life expectancy, that being something people really care about a lot? The U.S. is way down at #31. Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, and Finland are all higher.
I think you need to justify your claim.
You have to assume your servers will get hacked. It doesn't matter what software you're running. Someone will find a way in. Any competent developer starts with that assumption and designs around it. That's why you never ever EVER store sensitive data unencrypted! They're looking for someone to blame for their incompetence.
Wealth doesn't mean money. Wealth means things of inherent value. Money is just a bookkeeping tool for keeping track of wealth. If you create a valuable good, you've created wealth. If you increase the money supply, you just cause inflation so the (arbitrary) monetary value we attach to that good changes, but you don't create wealth.
Seems like there's an important lesson here. When you start dropping bombs, you're not just killing the people you drop them on. You have to assume you'll also kill some random people who happen to live there a few decades from now. So think really carefully before dropping bombs.
There's so many reasons you might have trouble accessing a website. It's not always censorship. One person says he can't access slashdot, and with nothing but that, we've got a discussion thread full of people denouncing India. Seriously?
Lots of other folks in India say it works fine for them. So it's not censorship, just one person having network problems. It happens. It's not a big deal.
Don't jump to conclusions. Take your time, get the facts. And seriously how did the slashdot editors let this through? They're totally not doing their job when they post rumors and wild speculation as if it were news.
You: "Hi, I'd like to make a dinner reservation for Friday at 6:30."
Restaurant employee: "Sure, let me pull up the calendar." (The computer identifies you by caller ID and notes you don't drink alcohol, so it's a bad idea to let you take up a table at their busiest time.) "I'm sorry, we don't have any free seats then. We do have openings at 5:30, or after 7."
No possibilities for abuse here, none at all.
I've occasionally been in positions where I didn't have enough work to keep me busy, and I hate it. It's more stressful than being overworked in some ways.
For example, I once started a new job, and almost immediately my supervisor went on vacation for a month. Before he left we went over the project I was going to be working on, and he figured I had everything I needed to get a good start on it while he was away. Well, I finished the whole project in two weeks. So I spent the next two weeks wandering the office and asking everyone, "Can I do anything to help you out? Can you give me something useful to do? Please?" Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.
This reminds me of the XKCD strip about free speech. Free speech means you have the right to say what you want. It doesn't mean anyone has to listen to you. It doesn't mean they can't think you're an asshole for saying it. It doesn't mean there won't be consequences.
This person exercised his right to say what he wanted, and I fully support him having that right. And lots of other people are exercising their right to think he's an asshole for saying it, and I fully support them having that right. No one's censoring him or trying to silence him. They're just expressing their own opinions, as they have the right to do.
I'd really like advice on this. I absolutely never want a video to autoplay. Period. NoScript seems to block most of them, but occasional sites still get through. Are there other tools I should look at?
This is purely a political decision, nothing to do with any legitimate concerns. If this were being pushed by the military, if they were raising issues about trans people serving, I would listen carefully to what they said and give their views appropriate weight. But that's not what's happening. They already studied the subject and concluded there were no serious problems with trans people serving. In fact, they were totally caught off guard by this announcement. When asked to comment on it, they just told reporters to go ask the white house. No surprise: the military doesn't make policy announcements on twitter. This is just Trump pandering to the religious right and trying to distract people from the health care debate and Russia investigation.
"We think movies are best seen in theaters, but unfortunately some viewers disagree. That's why we need an exclusive period to compel them to go to the theater anyway. We can't take the risk that some ignorant customers will choose to watch it the way they prefer instead of the way we want them to."
Solar is now one of the cheapest forms of energy available, and the price is still falling. So sure, any energy source is going to cost a lot to power the whole country. But compared to mining coal (which was considered "cheap energy" until a few years ago), putting up all those solar panels is a bargain. That's one of the reasons coal is dying. (Other reasons include wind and natural gas, which have also come way down in price and are now cheaper than coal.)
Not sure what you mean about the distribution system? Solar energy goes over the same electric grid as everything else.
Hire competent C developers and you should be good to go.
Anyone who is a competent C programmer understands the limitations of the language, knows there's a lot of truth in his criticisms, and uses C only when there are no other reasonable options. They understand that because they're competent C programmers.
You can write correct code in any language, or incorrect code in any language, but the choice of language makes a really big difference in how many errors your code has. C is a minefield of potential errors that don't exist in many other languages, and then it only gives you really primitive tools for avoiding those errors. You're responsible for manually doing all memory allocation, and then manually freeing that memory when it's done, and you don't even have access to destructors or try/finally constructs to do that more safely. All memory access is through pointers, which can then be used to access any memory location in the program's address space. That's insane. We've learned a lot about language design in the 40 years since C was created, and we know there are much better ways of doing these things.
At least use C++ instead of C. It's a superset of C, so it can do anything C can do. But it also provides tools for avoiding those problems. Use STL containers instead of arrays. Use references instead of pointers whenever possible. Use destructors to do your memory management via RAII. You will make fewer mistakes, and your code will contain fewer errors as a result.
I mean the guy posting this, not Amazon. He shorts a stock, then writes an article telling everyone they ought to sell that stock. He hopes some people will listen to him, in which case the price goes down, he immediately covers his short, and makes money. Nothing to do with Amazon really. It's a standard trick you can do with any stock. But only if you can get enough people to listen to you so it affects the stock price.
> I'm waiting for the headline, "Is Betteridge's Law True?"
No. I mean yes. I mean... no, I mean...
Don't do that!
I meant high end systems, ones with positional head and hand tracking. If you include low end phone based systems, it's Cardboard by a huge margin. Both those don't compete with Rift.
The #1 selling VR system is PSVR. #2 is Vive. Rift simply isn't doing a good job of competing with them. That doesn't mean VR has a problem. It just means Oculus has a problem.
When the #3 player in a market isn't doing well, you can't conclude much about the market. How is the #1 player doing?
This is interesting, because it shows what Trump does when two of his core principles are in conflict. Jobs are good! Foreigners are evil! So which of those does he care about more? What does he do when creating jobs involves letting in foreigners? Now we know: "foreigners are evil" wins out. That's more important to him than creating jobs.
Which tells you that when he uses jobs to justify keeping out foreigners, he's probably just being a hypocrite. Not that that's a surprise.
They aren't using electrodes. I believe they're using IR to image blood flow in the outer layers of the brain.
I think what you really meant is, "Why not store that excess energy for future use?" Hydrogen is one way of doing it. Batteries are another. Pumped hydro is yet another. And the answer is that long term, that's absolutely the right thing to do. Several large battery storage systems have come online in California in the last year. But right now, there isn't enough grid storage to balance out all the fluctuations in supply and demand, so cases like this sometimes happen.
You're making some wrong assumptions about me based on things I didn't say. I want to encourage people to be more rational. I think that's a good goal to have, and I'm willing to work hard for it. I'm not worried about getting killed or my family starving as a result. Thankfully, I live in a country where that isn't a big concern. I do take the risk of finding I've wasted my time and failed to convince someone, and I'm fine with that risk.
But that's all irrelevant to what I was saying. Do you go into a discussion viewing the other people as enemies or opponents, people you are trying to "defeat"? That's what you indicated in your first post. You called them "opponents" and talked about wanting to hurt them. I don't see things that way. I'd much rather have an interesting conversation with them, one where we both learn something we didn't know before. I assume I might be wrong about some things, and I want to find out what those are. If I manipulate someone's emotions, I might convince them to agree with one of my false beliefs, and I might lose an opportunity to learn something. Both bad outcomes. I also lose a chance to encourage someone to be more rational. That's also a bad outcome. I think the world needs more rationality.