Now, the US has four times as many murders per capita, but those numbers are quite skewed by major cities. Major cities, oddly enough, with highly restrictive gun policies.
Correlation is not causation. A better causation would be poverty in densely populated areas, not gun policies.
I guess I should mention that's still correlation, but there are a plethora of studies/data which show the strong correlation connection of poverty; there is a very weak correlation of gun policies. So, in science, the probability increases to a threshold where you can call it a cause.
You made a lot of logical jumps there. I, an American, particularly find my society full of annoying fear-mongers and people who believe them. In other words, I think there's a lot of people who DO expect harm will come to them when they shouldn't.
That's also why death tax is so hugely detrimental, because it prevents people from thinking about their business in terms of generations (tens, hundreds of years) but rather keeps them thinking about short term gain that they can realize and move on, trying either to avoid death taxes somehow or (worst case scenario) pay them, which requires liquidation of the assets, which means company. This prevents kids from taking over businesses, this prevents good stewardship of businesses.
There are only 5,500 estates in 2009 that paid an estate tax. I don't have any data (nor do I think it technically exists) for the amount of those that are small business where the individual owned the entire estate, and the liquid assets were low enough to actually require liquidation of a company's assets to pay the tax. But I bet it's in the hundreds, max. Maybe dozens. So, if there is a need to fix the US tax laws for at most a few hundred tax entities (those estates which fall into that narrow window), fine, but that's a statistical anomaly in the tax laws, not a refutation of estate tax. People still do or don't think about their business in long terms with or without estate taxes (for example, the liquidation problem can be solved by incorporation).
For most applications of the estate tax, it's simply a HUGE tax break on a certain type of income. For example, let's say John pays 33% on his $100,000/year salary income. He then receives $5.25 million one year as an inheritance income. He pays 0% tax on that. That's just a huge fucking tax break.
It's arguable that company non-liquid assets as inheritance should be taxed at a different rate than cash, but then we go down the rabbit hole that left the US with the most complex tax laws in the world, and I think that's out of scope for this discussion.
People who are making little money in USA are NOT productive.
That's not (necessarily) true. You can be the most productive person in the country and not get paid for the services and goods you produce. You can be super-efficient even as you make an average salary.
I was stopped by the police for trying to walk to work. They told me it was illegal to walk along the side of the road. Total insanity.
That law sounds like it is intended to save lives, which is not insane. The idea of walking directly next to roads where 2000 pound machines drive by at 55 miles per hour sounds insane to me.
You work hard, but only because you're so damn ineffective.
It simply doesn't make sense to say an entire people of a first world country are "effective" or "ineffective". That's not a quantifiable statistic, unlike productivity.
Regardless of the awful things that happened in the past, these in no way relate to the subject at hand. 18th century "yanks" no longer exist in America. And I think Americans are very aware of Reagan and two bushes. Basically, America is much more than the limited portrayal that you've commented on. P.s. I'm no right winger
I think you've gotten a lot of answers to your comment, idontgno, so my response may just end up in/dev/null. But I want to say, after all the discussion on this slashdot forum about coding, your response about the Serenety Prayer is the most apt to so many situations in my personal coding career. I've been through small and large companies, dumb-ass coworkers and co-workers who were smarter than me, and tons of code reviews where people get pissed, and tons of just straight up "coding bullshit". Lots of arguments about what is a "better coder" and the newest fad in coding paradigms. The best wisdom I could say isn't technical, but what you provided:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
I feel like I am a more mature person for knowing this.
1. The original C++ was written in C with macros dealing with function pointers. 2. Using function pointers is kind of like OOP.:) It really is! They are exactly interfaces (Java interfaces, can't remember their term in C++ I think pure virtual classes). 3.
There isn't any point in arguing with people like that.
But it sounds like an interesting conversation if you're willing to listen with an open mind.
Bad code can easily meet coding standards. Most code reviews I've been through would nit pick the punctuation between the change request number and the date stamp on the update comment, while completely ignoring the glaring code bug.
Totally hear you there, brah. My first code review took some C code that went from working perfectly to failing in many ways. But the main takeaway was that I should write for loops like "for (int i = 0; i
And like the OP said, it doesn't matter if it's good or bad as long as it works.
Well, this is what everyone's up in arms about. It matters that it works, yes. But it does matter if it's good or bad, because time is a dimension that continues past the present.
It's not just about skill. If the original programmer failed to comment the code so that others can maintain it, then that is bad code! Comments are not an optional programming language feature that can be safely ignored.
I love what you're saying. I think you should write variables names and function names so long they stretch 120 columns (I'm slightly exaggerating). I love clear documentation. I love well designed software.
Nonetheless, I'm a programmer who has worked in the gamut of coworker programmer skills. Large companies and startups alike. And I know that there is a FUCKING HUGE part to programmer skills. A huge part to coworker's intellectual capability. No amazingly self-documenting code will fix that.
y. If you need a problem solved quickly, and better than what all your competitors can do, he's your man. However, his code when I joined the company had some of the issues the poster mentioned, and that made me laugh. He's a very fast typist, but his typing speed is his limiting factor in coding, so he used 1 and 2 letter variables mostly. Writing code inline is faster to type than factoring out a bunch of small functions. Comments just slow him down. The first day working for him, I opened one of his most ingenious pieces of code (responsible for better 2-level logic optimization than what Synopsis had at the time), and tried to understand the 2,000 line file, which is tiny given the job it does. It's core is a brilliant 1,000 line function, and it took me all day to figure it out. I thought there had to be documentation somewhere, so I grep-ed the whole code base, all 350,000 lines of it, for comments. There was one. It said, "This is a hack."
This is bullshit. You didn't describe a "best programmer" you described a business. One comment saying "this is a hack" for a 2,000 line file which you couldn't understand implies this was written by a bad coder. Or, at the very least (I'm giving you a lot here), it implies it wasn't good code, just working functionality.
The Constitution guarantees your right to express your views, no matter how distasteful.
Sort of. It guarantees the government can't pass laws to prevent you from expressing your views. Some expression of views can be prohibited in certain manners of expressions and circumstances.
The Constitution does not guarantee the integrity of your teeth, should you seriously offend me.
So then Anonymous is exercising their freedom of speech? I say yes.
No, the hacking which Anonymous did was somewhere between an act of private property burglary and destruction. Exercising freedom of speech is not breaking in to a private server.
if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
I hear this argument a lot. When Gabby Giffords was shot, there were two people present who had guns on them. Those two people didn't prevent the shooter from harming anyone; they thought if they pulled out their guns, that they themselves would have been shot.
Those who do the real important work never get what they are actually worth
That has nothing to do with capitalism, that is circumstantial. Sometimes they get more, sometimes they get less, sometimes they get what they are worth. Capitalism actually abets people who do the real important work to get what they are actually worth.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to allow remote work. This is coming from someone who did work from home 9/10 days at a previous company. Just because they couldn't find someone to work in the office doesn't mean they are wrong for looking.
I have to do ~4 interviews a week here in San Francisco for my company because we're hiring so much. Yes, we need programmers, kids right out of college.
Not a shot towards you, but only 1/10 get the job, because we are looking for good people. But yes, there are jobs for kids straight out of college.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, the US has four times as many murders per capita, but those numbers are quite skewed by major cities. Major cities, oddly enough, with highly restrictive gun policies.
Correlation is not causation. A better causation would be poverty in densely populated areas, not gun policies.
I guess I should mention that's still correlation, but there are a plethora of studies/data which show the strong correlation connection of poverty; there is a very weak correlation of gun policies. So, in science, the probability increases to a threshold where you can call it a cause.
You made a lot of logical jumps there. I, an American, particularly find my society full of annoying fear-mongers and people who believe them. In other words, I think there's a lot of people who DO expect harm will come to them when they shouldn't.
That's also why death tax is so hugely detrimental, because it prevents people from thinking about their business in terms of generations (tens, hundreds of years) but rather keeps them thinking about short term gain that they can realize and move on, trying either to avoid death taxes somehow or (worst case scenario) pay them, which requires liquidation of the assets, which means company. This prevents kids from taking over businesses, this prevents good stewardship of businesses.
There are only 5,500 estates in 2009 that paid an estate tax. I don't have any data (nor do I think it technically exists) for the amount of those that are small business where the individual owned the entire estate, and the liquid assets were low enough to actually require liquidation of a company's assets to pay the tax. But I bet it's in the hundreds, max. Maybe dozens. So, if there is a need to fix the US tax laws for at most a few hundred tax entities (those estates which fall into that narrow window), fine, but that's a statistical anomaly in the tax laws, not a refutation of estate tax. People still do or don't think about their business in long terms with or without estate taxes (for example, the liquidation problem can be solved by incorporation).
For most applications of the estate tax, it's simply a HUGE tax break on a certain type of income. For example, let's say John pays 33% on his $100,000/year salary income. He then receives $5.25 million one year as an inheritance income. He pays 0% tax on that. That's just a huge fucking tax break.
It's arguable that company non-liquid assets as inheritance should be taxed at a different rate than cash, but then we go down the rabbit hole that left the US with the most complex tax laws in the world, and I think that's out of scope for this discussion.
Yep, I think those are good ideas. Still, here's an analogy: seat belts are a good thing, even if nobody who will cause an accident.
#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.
Is that a bad thing? It's good for people to bail rather than stick out something crap for the long haul.
False dichotomy. It's also good for people to not get married if they don't intend to spend the rest of their lives together.
Regardless of whether or not marriage/divorce is good or not, that wasn't a false dichotomy. Marriage is one thing, divorce is another.
Your comment was like the stupid response where someone says "I'm sorry" and they reply "Why? You didn't do it."
Free healthcare is understood by most people to mean the same thing as free police and fire services. Obviously it's tax supported.
People who are making little money in USA are NOT productive.
That's not (necessarily) true. You can be the most productive person in the country and not get paid for the services and goods you produce. You can be super-efficient even as you make an average salary.
I was stopped by the police for trying to walk to work. They told me it was illegal to walk along the side of the road. Total insanity.
That law sounds like it is intended to save lives, which is not insane. The idea of walking directly next to roads where 2000 pound machines drive by at 55 miles per hour sounds insane to me.
You work hard, but only because you're so damn ineffective.
It simply doesn't make sense to say an entire people of a first world country are "effective" or "ineffective". That's not a quantifiable statistic, unlike productivity.
while (strncmp(&str1[i], &str2[j], 1) == 0) ...
I suspect he assumed that this was like an assembler macro instead of a function call...
That seems like perfectly cromulent code to me.
Regardless of the awful things that happened in the past, these in no way relate to the subject at hand. 18th century "yanks" no longer exist in America. And I think Americans are very aware of Reagan and two bushes. Basically, America is much more than the limited portrayal that you've commented on. P.s. I'm no right winger
You misunderstood. He said the democratic party does not relate to a communist party.
I think you've gotten a lot of answers to your comment, idontgno, so my response may just end up in /dev/null. But I want to say, after all the discussion on this slashdot forum about coding, your response about the Serenety Prayer is the most apt to so many situations in my personal coding career. I've been through small and large companies, dumb-ass coworkers and co-workers who were smarter than me, and tons of code reviews where people get pissed, and tons of just straight up "coding bullshit". Lots of arguments about what is a "better coder" and the newest fad in coding paradigms. The best wisdom I could say isn't technical, but what you provided:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I feel like I am a more mature person for knowing this.
I'm not trying to troll you, I'm being serious :)
1. The original C++ was written in C with macros dealing with function pointers. :) It really is! They are exactly interfaces (Java interfaces, can't remember their term in C++ I think pure virtual classes).
2. Using function pointers is kind of like OOP.
3.
There isn't any point in arguing with people like that.
But it sounds like an interesting conversation if you're willing to listen with an open mind.
Bad code can easily meet coding standards. Most code reviews I've been through would nit pick the punctuation between the change request number and the date stamp on the update comment, while completely ignoring the glaring code bug.
Totally hear you there, brah. My first code review took some C code that went from working perfectly to failing in many ways. But the main takeaway was that I should write for loops like "for (int i = 0; i
And like the OP said, it doesn't matter if it's good or bad as long as it works.
Well, this is what everyone's up in arms about. It matters that it works, yes. But it does matter if it's good or bad, because time is a dimension that continues past the present.
It's not just about skill. If the original programmer failed to comment the code so that others can maintain it, then that is bad code! Comments are not an optional programming language feature that can be safely ignored.
I love what you're saying. I think you should write variables names and function names so long they stretch 120 columns (I'm slightly exaggerating). I love clear documentation. I love well designed software.
Nonetheless, I'm a programmer who has worked in the gamut of coworker programmer skills. Large companies and startups alike. And I know that there is a FUCKING HUGE part to programmer skills. A huge part to coworker's intellectual capability. No amazingly self-documenting code will fix that.
y. If you need a problem solved quickly, and better than what all your competitors can do, he's your man. However, his code when I joined the company had some of the issues the poster mentioned, and that made me laugh. He's a very fast typist, but his typing speed is his limiting factor in coding, so he used 1 and 2 letter variables mostly. Writing code inline is faster to type than factoring out a bunch of small functions. Comments just slow him down. The first day working for him, I opened one of his most ingenious pieces of code (responsible for better 2-level logic optimization than what Synopsis had at the time), and tried to understand the 2,000 line file, which is tiny given the job it does. It's core is a brilliant 1,000 line function, and it took me all day to figure it out. I thought there had to be documentation somewhere, so I grep-ed the whole code base, all 350,000 lines of it, for comments. There was one. It said, "This is a hack."
This is bullshit. You didn't describe a "best programmer" you described a business. One comment saying "this is a hack" for a 2,000 line file which you couldn't understand implies this was written by a bad coder. Or, at the very least (I'm giving you a lot here), it implies it wasn't good code, just working functionality.
To be fair, (many of) the founding fathers were prolific writers and you can read a lot about their philosophies in order to know what they supported.
The Constitution guarantees your right to express your views, no matter how distasteful.
Sort of. It guarantees the government can't pass laws to prevent you from expressing your views. Some expression of views can be prohibited in certain manners of expressions and circumstances.
The Constitution does not guarantee the integrity of your teeth, should you seriously offend me.
That's actually true! That's for the state laws.
So then Anonymous is exercising their freedom of speech? I say yes.
No, the hacking which Anonymous did was somewhere between an act of private property burglary and destruction. Exercising freedom of speech is not breaking in to a private server.
if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
I hear this argument a lot. When Gabby Giffords was shot, there were two people present who had guns on them. Those two people didn't prevent the shooter from harming anyone; they thought if they pulled out their guns, that they themselves would have been shot.
Your points are valid, except for this:
Those who do the real important work never get what they are actually worth
That has nothing to do with capitalism, that is circumstantial. Sometimes they get more, sometimes they get less, sometimes they get what they are worth. Capitalism actually abets people who do the real important work to get what they are actually worth.
The point is that IT is in demand and the wages haven't gone up, not that IT workers are whining.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to allow remote work. This is coming from someone who did work from home 9/10 days at a previous company. Just because they couldn't find someone to work in the office doesn't mean they are wrong for looking.
I have to do ~4 interviews a week here in San Francisco for my company because we're hiring so much. Yes, we need programmers, kids right out of college.
Not a shot towards you, but only 1/10 get the job, because we are looking for good people. But yes, there are jobs for kids straight out of college.