1) want computers to read their minds (because they don't understand the technology) 2) get freaked out by good prediction (because they don't understand the technology)
A second is NOT negligible. Google's touting that Google Instant saves 2-5 seconds per search, so obviously they care about delays at that grain. Adding a fade-in works against being fast and efficient.
The point seems moot, however, as Google no longer fades in (at least for me - yay!).
Because for a lot of TV shows, you can get the same thing for free via Hulu (or the network's website)?
The only reason to e-rent TV shows is if you have little self-control and/or lots of disposable income. Most are online for free (legitimately) within a week. For the odd one out, waiting for Netflix to get it really isn't that bad, IMO.
Correction: I believe Nedry did shut off the T-Rex fences (the perimeter fences, I think - "fences are failing all over the park"). It was the reset that tripped the circuit breakers that disabled the raptor fences ("even Nedry knew better than to mess with the raptor fences.").
That movie is filled with crappy planning. It's a little disingenuous that the moral of the movie is "life finds a way" and then they show you how life finds a way... when everybody cuts corners and sucks at planning. It's still awesome, though.:)
I think it's true for Python because they intentionally restrict the appearance of the code to reflect the syntactic structure. There's no reason it couldn't be that way for C, other than that somebody thought it was a good idea to separate the two.
The separation of the two doesn't yield many benefits that I see, mostly just formatting holy wars (and cool obfuscation contests, although the fact those are even possible should've been a big red flag, IMO).
You have a good point about crappy software stripping whitespace. This is a general pet-peeve of mine.
Maybe my ignorance is showing, but why is it so unreasonable to expect WYSIWYG whitespace? If I put two spaces somewhere, why would someone decide I want one? If I'm allotted 100 chars and I want them to be whitespace, what's wrong with that? Just that it's easier to detect than gibberish? If I really cared about spamming useless info, I'd just fill it with gibberish (or book text) instead of whitespace. I just don't get it...
Many people think Python's lack of braces is a terrible idea when they first learn about it. Then they try it and realize that 1) it's almost never actually a problem and 2) it lends a clean, useful consistency to all code.
Finally, if (1) turns out to be false in your environment, your blocks are probably too long. When a convention works well for almost everybody but you, it's time to examine yourself.
Regarding "the inherent unreliability of estimation", this is exactly what agile methods like Scrum try to compensate for. People are wary of buzzwords like "agile" because they're wrongly applied all over the place (at one job I worked, we tried "agile" as meaning "nothing gets spec'd and business expects more features").
But if you practice agile / Scrum well (I highly recommend the book "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" for a starting place), you start to see that they actually make a ridiculous amount of sense. Schedules are based on short timeboxes and bottom-up planning means devs are the ones who say "yes we can do that in this timebox" or "no we can't". The system expects you to make mistakes and feeds that input back into the next round so your estimates get better and better.
This clearly works best in the SaaS world, where there's generally low deployment / deliverable overhead, but I believe some of the lessons of this methodology can be applied to almost any field. By empowering the engineers, you encourage a sense of pride and ownership. And when everything's humming smoothly, you deliver regularly, on time, and without a lot of stress.
If you're that dependent on a single person, you have a major dysfunction somewhere in your system. If somebody was that valuable, they could hold the entire company hostage: "pay me X or I'll quit and you won't be able to release your product!"
It also seems like an over-simplification to attribute a company's failings to treating their employees well. All sorts of things go into a successful product; company direction and marketing seem much more important than whether your employees are out for a few extra weeks a year.
Wow, there are so many things I disagree with in this post, I can't address them all in the time I have to type this.
The primary one is the following quote:
even though the GC system is supposed to solve all memory issues!
Anybody who claims GC is supposed to solve all memory issues clearly doesn't understand all memory issues. I really don't understand where you got that idea.
And if you have a better solution to the problem IDisposable and using solve, I'd honestly like to hear it.
I also don't understand how you can think Ruby is cleaner. I imagine Perl is then the cleanest language of all?:) Or are you talking about expressiveness? Because that's truly a different issue, IMO.
No, in situation 1, everybody's happy because they all got a deal they agreed to.
It's silly to suggest that if I sold you something at 99, I'm automatically unhappy because I could have sold it for 99.1. If that really makes me unhappy, I should have sold for 99.1. Otherwise, it's my fault for underselling and I need to learn to charge the right price. In other words, it's not the middleman's fault that I charged the wrong price.
Look at it this way: if nobody knew the middleman existed, would they still be happy? If yes, then they really don't have much to complain about. If the presence of the middleman irks you, charge/offer the *right* price.
HFT, is not, as I understand it, anything like what you say above. Maybe I misunderstand; if so, please enlighten me.
The difference in HFT that I see is that the person pocketing the pennies has approval from both the buyer and the seller to do so (by virtue of the fact that they did the deal with them). That's not stealing; that's just simple profit.
Everybody seems so intent on making HFT look evil but I'm not seeing a good argument against it other than "those bastards are making money."
Economically, no purchase should ever make you happy or improve your condition. If you are better off after your purchase, then the seller should have charged more. Or someone should have added a middleman-markup.
Ugh. This isn't insightful; it's absurd. If we take your logic to its conclusion, there's no such thing as a middleman markup. Because then that middleman is the customer and yet another middleman should have already added the markup.
The truth is that economic value is subjective. Economically, *every* purchase should make you happy while simultaneously making the seller happy. Because you both value the thing differently. If this wasn't the case, neither of you would have any incentive to make the deal.
HFT changes none of this that I can see. There are more opportunities for middlemen, but as long as I get the price I wanted, I'm still happy (just maybe not as happy as I could have been had I been in the middleman's position). I don't see the great evil of being a middleman; life's unfair and some people are in positions to exploit price differences. As long as they don't commit fraud to do it, what's the big deal?
I may be mistaken, but I think you're overly-constraining arbitrage. In the contexts I've seen it used, arbitrage is just exploiting market inefficiencies for profit, which I believe HFT does. It exploits the limited speed of information propagation to make money. Am I mistaken?
The dictionary definitions I just looked specifically refer to buying and selling "different markets", which seems arbitrary and outdated. It looks like arbitrage meant something very specific when it was coined; now, I think it's a bit more general.
You're exactly right. Thanks for calling out the difference between arbitrage and liquidity. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Have a supportive reply, instead.:)
How do you handle that if the name doesn't _fit_ on the mailing label?
Well, you certainly don't restrict your *database* columns because of a *mailing* label. What happens when you get a smaller mailing label? Go back and add new length constraints to your DB? I'd hate to work in that system.
Moraelin is mostly right. There's no need to create *arbitrary* edge cases. Arbitrarily constraining your data means you won't have a good reason when you encounter something that doesn't fit those constraints. And, more-than-likely, you're going to screw yourself by outlawing a perfectly-valid case that you didn't know you'd need down the road.
Set something within the perf / storage bounds of your system and then handle the interface to each consumer of your data as logically as you can. Then if your constraints are violated, you at least know you have a good reason not to support that case.
Re:You knew nothing of the sort
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
This. A thousand times this. It's my biggest disappointment - that they effectively lied to us with double talk and broken promises.
were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island
Except life sucked for many of them in "purgatory". Jin and Sun running from her dad... Sayid watching Nadia with his brother... Charlie depressed and abusing substances all over the place... Kate still on the run... Desmond without Penny...
If they were going to have a real fantasy, you'd expect them to fantasize about the good life they actually wanted when they were alive. But that isn't very compelling TV. No, this is just another example of bad writing that they just assume the audience will eat up and turn into something semi-coherent. You're just doing their job for them.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I saw this years ago and thought "what a perfect analogy - you don't know what's in the box, either!". Unfortunately, then I let those around me convince me that the show had a destination. I was a sucker. I'm a little annoyed at them, but I can only really blame myself. Next time I trust my instincts.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
If I had mod points, I would mod you up.:)
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Star Wars wasn't sold on the premise that there was any greater mystery or meaning to the Force. It was exciting for what it was and believable in the universe. We could sympathize with and believe the characters; mysteries that were brought up were solved.
The Lost writers sold the audience on the idea that there was some deeper, exciting mystery to what was going on. That was utter bullshit. They were on life support until they could get to their meaningless new-age ending.
Lost became all about the characters because that's all there ever was. If that was enough for you, fine. It wasn't enough for me and I'm annoyed that there are people who do the writers' jobs for them by cobbling together loosely-related dots into an effort to make meaning out of six years of TV.
If you enjoyed the show for the characters, fine. But please don't pretend it was any deeper than that.
>people smoking is an indicator that the information given to the population about tobacco was insufficient or wrong
This is pretty naive. I used to think the way you do about smoking and drugs. "Why would anybody ever do that? Don't they know how bad it is for them?" I said that once around an occasional-smoker friend who simply corrected me with "It's not about whether they're bad for you; it's about how they make you feel." It's not fundamentally an "education about drugs" problem. It's something much more complicated.
Those of us who spend most of our time intentionally processing and analyzing stuff with our brain forget that there are a lot of people who don't (and don't know how to start). You can't just throw information at people and expect them to draw the right conclusions; you have to teach them to think. That's the hardest part of all.
You really think people who spend money on entertainment are stupid? Because that's all it comes down to.
The game maker has a world where you can have fun/power and, if you spend real money, you can have MORE fun/power. It doesn't float my boat, but I certainly wouldn't put somebody in the "most stupid" category because a game was worth a few bucks a month to them. I see no real distinction between these games and most MMOs.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like a lot of people
1) want computers to read their minds (because they don't understand the technology)
2) get freaked out by good prediction (because they don't understand the technology)
Which is it gonna be people!?
A second is NOT negligible. Google's touting that Google Instant saves 2-5 seconds per search, so obviously they care about delays at that grain. Adding a fade-in works against being fast and efficient.
The point seems moot, however, as Google no longer fades in (at least for me - yay!).
[Citation Needed]
Not calling you out so much as interested in the source of this information.
Because for a lot of TV shows, you can get the same thing for free via Hulu (or the network's website)?
The only reason to e-rent TV shows is if you have little self-control and/or lots of disposable income. Most are online for free (legitimately) within a week. For the odd one out, waiting for Netflix to get it really isn't that bad, IMO.
Correction: I believe Nedry did shut off the T-Rex fences (the perimeter fences, I think - "fences are failing all over the park"). It was the reset that tripped the circuit breakers that disabled the raptor fences ("even Nedry knew better than to mess with the raptor fences.").
That movie is filled with crappy planning. It's a little disingenuous that the moral of the movie is "life finds a way" and then they show you how life finds a way... when everybody cuts corners and sucks at planning. It's still awesome, though. :)
Diablo II also required spreadsheets for even causal play
I'm not sure we have the same definition of casual play...
I think it's true for Python because they intentionally restrict the appearance of the code to reflect the syntactic structure. There's no reason it couldn't be that way for C, other than that somebody thought it was a good idea to separate the two.
The separation of the two doesn't yield many benefits that I see, mostly just formatting holy wars (and cool obfuscation contests, although the fact those are even possible should've been a big red flag, IMO).
You have a good point about crappy software stripping whitespace. This is a general pet-peeve of mine.
Maybe my ignorance is showing, but why is it so unreasonable to expect WYSIWYG whitespace? If I put two spaces somewhere, why would someone decide I want one? If I'm allotted 100 chars and I want them to be whitespace, what's wrong with that? Just that it's easier to detect than gibberish? If I really cared about spamming useless info, I'd just fill it with gibberish (or book text) instead of whitespace. I just don't get it...
Spoken like somebody who's never coded Python. :)
Many people think Python's lack of braces is a terrible idea when they first learn about it. Then they try it and realize that 1) it's almost never actually a problem and 2) it lends a clean, useful consistency to all code.
Finally, if (1) turns out to be false in your environment, your blocks are probably too long. When a convention works well for almost everybody but you, it's time to examine yourself.
tl;dr Features, Quality, Date: Choose Two
Regarding "the inherent unreliability of estimation", this is exactly what agile methods like Scrum try to compensate for. People are wary of buzzwords like "agile" because they're wrongly applied all over the place (at one job I worked, we tried "agile" as meaning "nothing gets spec'd and business expects more features").
But if you practice agile / Scrum well (I highly recommend the book "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" for a starting place), you start to see that they actually make a ridiculous amount of sense. Schedules are based on short timeboxes and bottom-up planning means devs are the ones who say "yes we can do that in this timebox" or "no we can't". The system expects you to make mistakes and feeds that input back into the next round so your estimates get better and better.
This clearly works best in the SaaS world, where there's generally low deployment / deliverable overhead, but I believe some of the lessons of this methodology can be applied to almost any field. By empowering the engineers, you encourage a sense of pride and ownership. And when everything's humming smoothly, you deliver regularly, on time, and without a lot of stress.
If you're that dependent on a single person, you have a major dysfunction somewhere in your system. If somebody was that valuable, they could hold the entire company hostage: "pay me X or I'll quit and you won't be able to release your product!"
It also seems like an over-simplification to attribute a company's failings to treating their employees well. All sorts of things go into a successful product; company direction and marketing seem much more important than whether your employees are out for a few extra weeks a year.
Wow, there are so many things I disagree with in this post, I can't address them all in the time I have to type this.
The primary one is the following quote:
even though the GC system is supposed to solve all memory issues!
Anybody who claims GC is supposed to solve all memory issues clearly doesn't understand all memory issues. I really don't understand where you got that idea.
And if you have a better solution to the problem IDisposable and using solve, I'd honestly like to hear it.
I also don't understand how you can think Ruby is cleaner. I imagine Perl is then the cleanest language of all? :) Or are you talking about expressiveness? Because that's truly a different issue, IMO.
No, in situation 1, everybody's happy because they all got a deal they agreed to.
It's silly to suggest that if I sold you something at 99, I'm automatically unhappy because I could have sold it for 99.1. If that really makes me unhappy, I should have sold for 99.1. Otherwise, it's my fault for underselling and I need to learn to charge the right price. In other words, it's not the middleman's fault that I charged the wrong price.
Look at it this way: if nobody knew the middleman existed, would they still be happy? If yes, then they really don't have much to complain about. If the presence of the middleman irks you, charge/offer the *right* price.
HFT, is not, as I understand it, anything like what you say above. Maybe I misunderstand; if so, please enlighten me.
The difference in HFT that I see is that the person pocketing the pennies has approval from both the buyer and the seller to do so (by virtue of the fact that they did the deal with them). That's not stealing; that's just simple profit.
Everybody seems so intent on making HFT look evil but I'm not seeing a good argument against it other than "those bastards are making money."
Economically, no purchase should ever make you happy or improve your condition. If you are better off after your purchase, then the seller should have charged more. Or someone should have added a middleman-markup.
Ugh. This isn't insightful; it's absurd. If we take your logic to its conclusion, there's no such thing as a middleman markup. Because then that middleman is the customer and yet another middleman should have already added the markup.
The truth is that economic value is subjective. Economically, *every* purchase should make you happy while simultaneously making the seller happy. Because you both value the thing differently. If this wasn't the case, neither of you would have any incentive to make the deal.
HFT changes none of this that I can see. There are more opportunities for middlemen, but as long as I get the price I wanted, I'm still happy (just maybe not as happy as I could have been had I been in the middleman's position). I don't see the great evil of being a middleman; life's unfair and some people are in positions to exploit price differences. As long as they don't commit fraud to do it, what's the big deal?
I may be mistaken, but I think you're overly-constraining arbitrage. In the contexts I've seen it used, arbitrage is just exploiting market inefficiencies for profit, which I believe HFT does. It exploits the limited speed of information propagation to make money. Am I mistaken?
The dictionary definitions I just looked specifically refer to buying and selling "different markets", which seems arbitrary and outdated. It looks like arbitrage meant something very specific when it was coined; now, I think it's a bit more general.
You're exactly right. Thanks for calling out the difference between arbitrage and liquidity. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Have a supportive reply, instead. :)
How do you handle that if the name doesn't _fit_ on the mailing label?
Well, you certainly don't restrict your *database* columns because of a *mailing* label. What happens when you get a smaller mailing label? Go back and add new length constraints to your DB? I'd hate to work in that system.
Moraelin is mostly right. There's no need to create *arbitrary* edge cases. Arbitrarily constraining your data means you won't have a good reason when you encounter something that doesn't fit those constraints. And, more-than-likely, you're going to screw yourself by outlawing a perfectly-valid case that you didn't know you'd need down the road.
Set something within the perf / storage bounds of your system and then handle the interface to each consumer of your data as logically as you can. Then if your constraints are violated, you at least know you have a good reason not to support that case.
This. A thousand times this. It's my biggest disappointment - that they effectively lied to us with double talk and broken promises.
Lies and sawdust...
were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island
Except life sucked for many of them in "purgatory". Jin and Sun running from her dad... Sayid watching Nadia with his brother... Charlie depressed and abusing substances all over the place... Kate still on the run... Desmond without Penny...
If they were going to have a real fantasy, you'd expect them to fantasize about the good life they actually wanted when they were alive. But that isn't very compelling TV. No, this is just another example of bad writing that they just assume the audience will eat up and turn into something semi-coherent. You're just doing their job for them.
To me, this section of an old Abrams TED talk confirms much of what you say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8#t=4m08s
I saw this years ago and thought "what a perfect analogy - you don't know what's in the box, either!". Unfortunately, then I let those around me convince me that the show had a destination. I was a sucker. I'm a little annoyed at them, but I can only really blame myself. Next time I trust my instincts.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up. :)
Star Wars wasn't sold on the premise that there was any greater mystery or meaning to the Force. It was exciting for what it was and believable in the universe. We could sympathize with and believe the characters; mysteries that were brought up were solved.
The Lost writers sold the audience on the idea that there was some deeper, exciting mystery to what was going on. That was utter bullshit. They were on life support until they could get to their meaningless new-age ending.
Lost became all about the characters because that's all there ever was. If that was enough for you, fine. It wasn't enough for me and I'm annoyed that there are people who do the writers' jobs for them by cobbling together loosely-related dots into an effort to make meaning out of six years of TV.
If you enjoyed the show for the characters, fine. But please don't pretend it was any deeper than that.
>people smoking is an indicator that the information given to the population about tobacco was insufficient or wrong
This is pretty naive. I used to think the way you do about smoking and drugs. "Why would anybody ever do that? Don't they know how bad it is for them?" I said that once around an occasional-smoker friend who simply corrected me with "It's not about whether they're bad for you; it's about how they make you feel." It's not fundamentally an "education about drugs" problem. It's something much more complicated.
Those of us who spend most of our time intentionally processing and analyzing stuff with our brain forget that there are a lot of people who don't (and don't know how to start). You can't just throw information at people and expect them to draw the right conclusions; you have to teach them to think. That's the hardest part of all.
Mod parent -1, Elitist Jerk
You really think people who spend money on entertainment are stupid? Because that's all it comes down to.
The game maker has a world where you can have fun/power and, if you spend real money, you can have MORE fun/power. It doesn't float my boat, but I certainly wouldn't put somebody in the "most stupid" category because a game was worth a few bucks a month to them. I see no real distinction between these games and most MMOs.
I propose a new moderator option:
-1 Woosh