I'd definitely rather be on a plane going 500mph than anything else. There's so little to run into up there.
There's even less to run into in a low-pressure, sealed tube. Not even much air. I suppose there are other trains running through the same tube, but tube traffic control is much simpler than air traffic control .
I will not voluntarily have something in my home that constantly spies on me and reports to somebody else.
Do what you like, but you should at least understand what the devices do/don't do. None of the devices currently on the market do what you describe. It's pretty easy to tell that just by watching their network traffic. What they do is to listen constantly for a hotword, using local recognition circuits only. When the hotword is detected, then they start actually listening for your command. I suspect that Google's at least, primarily does command recognition locally, though it also ships a copy of the command off to the cloud for analysis, and storage. You can use the Google Home app to play back everything that it listened to.
Personally, I like my Google Home. I'm annoyed that they nerfed the shopping list in Keep, but the recent addition of phone call support has more than made up for it. It gets used for a lot of different things, including random Google queries (mostly by my boys, to end (briefly) one of their endless debates), questions about weather, traffic, hours that stores are open, etc. I have a Nest thermostat, and controlling that by voice is nice. Oh, and music. More than anything. Especially since I have some Chromecast audio devices connected to various stereos around the house, grouped with the Home, so they all play together. Of course, our phones can do almost all the same things, but the Home is more convenient and seems to do a better job of voice recognition (which is saying something).
I'm not trying to convince you that you should want one. Just pointing out that the "spying" isn't what you claim and there actually is substantial utility.
Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry.
As darkain said above, Google did revolutionize this industry. Gigabit fiber to the home isn't ubiquitous by any means, but when Google Fiber kicked off it was nonexistent. Lots of areas in the country do now have access to it, and I don't think that would have happened without Google jumping in.
Haskell is a language where once you get your program to run at all it usually runs correctly.
That's a dangerous way to even think. Very few bugs are actually programming mistakes- the vast majority, and the harder to fix are design mistakes. Just because it compiles doesn't mean its anywhere close to right.
You haven't used Haskell, I see.
Oh, it's not a panacea by any means. But the nature of the language and its very strict typing really forces you to clarify lots of aspects of your design that you might not think nearly hard enough about in other languages. By the time you get your code to compile it's significantly closer to correct than other languages. Moreover the inherent lack of side effects in functional programming makes writing automated tests of Haskell code a breeze... so if you assume that getting your program to run also includes getting a good suite of automated tests to pass (as it should!), then you really can have pretty high confidence that the code does what you think it does.
Of course, what you think it does may not be what it should do. No programming language can do anything to find bugs in the requirements.
The AC who replied to you makes the same claim about Ada, where it is also true. But it's even more true of Haskell than Ada, IMO. I should mention that I've used both languages only on small projects. Ada has proven to scale well, though, and I suspect Haskell would as well, if you could find enough Haskell programmers to staff a large project.
The previous/. post gave a link to the abstract, which is only three sentences long, here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.034.... The third sentence is "This implies P not equal NP."
Points for style, gotta give him that much. "Other guys demonstrated abstruse technical thing. We demonstrate another variant of abstruse technical thing. This implies P not equal NP."
Of course, he probably could have been even more restrained. I imagine that to people in the field the fact that the monotone and non-monotone network complexities of the clique function having the same bounds obviously implied P != NP, so he could have left the sentence out entirely, which would have been even cooler.
He was talking about P!=NP. Almost no mathematician believes that P=NP. Notable exception: Donald Knuth once expressed your point of view.
As I recall, what Knuth said was that the worst possible solution of the P/NP question would be a non-constructive proof that P=NP. That would tell us that all problems are "easy", but not tell us anything about how to solve them efficiently. It would mean that we could never rely on problems to be hard where we want them to (e.g. cryptography), but wouldn't necessarily give us any insight about how to make them easy.
I don't think he ever expressed the opinion that he thought it likely that P=NP.
I was introduced to the ketogenic diet in March. I was intrigued and thought WTH. If it can help me lose weight then great! What I experienced was SOO much more. I've suffered from adult depression for over 30 years and taken different medications over the years.
There's a growing body of evidence that ketogenic diets help with all sorts of mental illnesses, including those that are much more severe than depression.
If you look back at the start of the low fat movement you will find money. Always follow the money.
This, on the other hand, is utterly useless advice. The problem with the "follow the money" argument is that it can almost always be used to support any side of any argument, depending on how deep you're willing look for the "nefarious manipulation". I mean, I could argue right now that meat producers are getting really worried about vegetarianism and veganism trends, so maybe they're greasing palms to produce all these anti-carb studies. If your response to that claim is "Nuh uh, because ketosis works for me", then you've completely abandoned science and are just following anecdotal evidence, at the mercy of all of your own cognitive biases.
Grease the right palm and viola...saturated fats are the cause of heart disease.
There's absolutely no evidence that any palm-greasing went on.
This has since been completely debunked scientifically.
Your wording makes a much stronger claim than is warranted by the science. What actually has been found in meta-analyses is that there is no evidence that saturated fats increase the risk of heart disease, but the meta-analyses have their own caveats and warnings.
I think a much better approach than attempting to "follow the money", since those paths lead in all directions, is to assume that scientists are working in good faith and providing their best current understanding. Accept that current knowledge is always wrong to some degree, and be conservative about taking radical action based on new studies.
For example, it's entirely possible that some seriously negative effects of a ketogenic diet may be discovered in a few years. That will provoke howls of outrage and complaints about how science is crap, scientists just produce whatever results they're paid for, etc. In the meantime the best thing most of us can do is to maintain a balanced diet, avoiding too much of anything, keeping our caloric intake sufficiently restricted and our activity levels high enough to maintain a reasonable level of fitness.
We have something we call a "court". You can take people there who violate contracts. It's pretty neat, no need to do anything yourself, to repossess the car or install tracking devices, all you do is go there and sue.
Which achieves exactly nothing if the collateral has already been sold and the borrower has no other assets with which to pay.
That being said, messing with YellowStone would have to be approached with great caution. As in old risk-taker me wouldn't touch it.
I think your risk analysis is faulty. It's certain that if we leave Yellowstone alone it will eventually erupt in an explosion that will kill much of the US outright and cause a global climate catastrophe of such scale that it poses a serious existential threat. When that will happen is unknown. We do know that the caldera floor has risen nearly 60 cm in the past 15 years, an order of magnitude more than it did in the preceding 80 years, and the temperature of Yellowstone lake has risen by about 7C. Whether this is just part of a regular cycle or something that presages an eruption we don't know.
Clearly, a lot more study is needed to get enough information to allow us to predict whether an eruption is 100K years away, or imminent. It's worth noting that even very small eruptions are tremendously powerful. One that happened 14K years ago created a 5 km-wide crater. But it makes sense to create plans for preventing an eruption now, in case study does find that an eruption is imminent. The odds are that it is not, but given the extreme damage that would be done by a super eruption, not planning to prevent it would be foolhardy in the extreme.
In Sweden, it's your car even if you paid 0% of the balance. If the car is the collateral, you cannot sell it and you are required to keep a certain level of insurance on the car. If you don't own it, it's considered a lease.
I'm skeptical. Do you mean to say that you actually have the title to the vehicle? If so, how are you prevented from selling it? Is there some system for establishing and tracking liens on vehicles? That seems like it would be complicated and error-prone... real estate is normally handled that way, but that's why we have to have title insurance and all of the complications it entails.
I suspect that it's more like the way it works in the US. When you buy (not lease) a monthly car with a payment, what you're doing is taking a loan for the full unpaid value of the car and fully purchasing the car from the dealer. The bank that lends you the money gets the title to the vehicle, so essentially they own it. When you pay it off, you get the title. Your loan contract specifies the details of how they are or are not allowed to repossess the vehicle, subject to limitations in the law.
Because the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is part of NASA. Which makes sense.
Strictly speaking, threats from Earth aren't their mission, but this particular threat looks a whole lot like other threats they study that are their mission. They are as well equipped to study it as anyone, and it's closely-related to threats that are their mission... so it makes sense that they would do it.
For someone, who offers no citations of his own, it is a tad too rich to demand that of others.
I did, actually. I mentioned an on-topic book, which is very much about economic/racial incentives in the post-reconstruction south. You really should read it.
Life itself is neither fair nor evenhanded.
We don't have to leave things the way we find them, and the inability to reach perfection is no reason not to strive for improvement.
The point was, the government's intervention in the fates of minorities did not achieve its results. It was and remains a failure.
I must have missed where blacks are still slaves (chattel or debt peons), or still segregated.
I'm comparing what we have today with what we would have had, had we simply let the market forces sort things out.
No, you're comparing what we have today with where you fantasize we might have been... in spite of the fact that the market made little progress on fixing the issues in a century. It wasn't until FDR put a stop to the use of trumped up charges to create slaves for hire in the 40s (something he did only to defang Nazi propaganda, actually), and LBJ pushed through and aggressively enforced the Civil Rights Act that significant progress was made.
I'm a strong believer in the power of free market economics, but markets optimize for the desires of the customers with the money, not for overall social good. In most cases, those two things are the same, which is why capitalism has proved to be the best way of providing for everyone. But in some cases, they're not the same. In the south, the customers with money wanted to keep the black man down, and they used both their votes and their dollars to do it.
If you want proof of that, think about what a purely market analysis would predict of an environment in which "separate but equal" was the law, but racial hierarchy was absent. Clearly, business owners would have had economic incentive to compete for both black and white customers in separate sides of their establishment, and would have found it most cost-effective to offer the same goods and service in both. Or if the economic differences in the segregated classes were large enough, they would have offered lesser services to the poorer class, at a lower price. What actually happened was that any white business owner who offered equal treatment or lower prices for blacks would find his white clientele vanishing -- or find his business or home vandalized and himself and his family ostracized. Black-owned businesses were suppressed through other, mostly extra-legal means like redlining and denial of credit (note that a rational, efficient market should have wiped out those practices, but didn't). The customers demanded that blacks be treated as lesser humans, and the market responded accordingly by providing separate and unequal services.
The fact is that the market worked perfectly well, it just didn't produce the outcome that you would like to suppose.
And, yes, the "Jim Crow" laws should've been declared simply unconstitutional — unfortunately for all, the Federal government's intervention went much further than that...
It had to. Merely rolling back the laws would not have affected the intent of the southern states to suppress and oppress blacks. It only removed one method. There were many others which also had to be shut down.
my issues (keys repeating and being unresponsive) were confirmed by Apple service to be hardware problems and the top case got replaced twice free of charge under warranty.
Hmm. I find that if I hit keys off-center they can get stuck down, causing repeats. I also have some non-responsive keys (the arrow keys are the worst). The latter I'm sure are problems with my unit, and repairable. The former seems like a design problem. Do you think it's not?
It's not just the touch bar, they FUBAR'd the entire keyboard. I'm nearly a year into using a MBP 2016 model daily and still make repeated typos due to low keyboard stroke depth. It's like typing on a piece of flat plastic.
+1
I got a 2016 MBP a few months ago, and I find I largely hate it. I like the four USB-C ports, a lot, especially being able to plug power into any of them, as well as being able to use my laptop power adapter to recharge my phone (Pixel XL).
The touch bar... meh. It doesn't really cause me problems, but I definitely don't love it. I might actually like it if they allowed me to configure which (touch bar-unaware) apps should use the touch keys as function keys. For most apps I prefer they have their default functions, to control brightness, volume, etc. But for some apps (most of my dev tools, and some games), I'd like them to automatically become function keys. But they don't.
The keyboard sucks. So much so that I find I really prefer to use the older MBP most of the time. I still have both, and both are actually owned by my employer. I'm supposed to turn the old MBP in soon (though they haven't been bugging me about it... probably because I'm not the only employee underwhelmed by the new model). I'm thinking I may turn the new one in instead.
Your conclusion does not follow from your observations, mostly because your observations are very shallow. Also, you are engaging in a blindingly blatant false equivalency. I won't attempt to address all of the problems in your statement, but I'll pick just one: the fact that black dissatisfaction appears to be higher after the first black president was elected. Note that I'm not claiming to offer an authoritative explanation of that fact, but just a plausible explanation which suggests a completely different conclusion than the one you're uncritically assuming.
I think the reason that black dissatisfaction has increased is because blacks saw the election of Obama as a turning point in race relations, as evidence that the country really was ready to listen to their concerns about the extensive and systemic oppression under which they live. Prior to that point, they had focused instead on the slow, steady improvement they were seeing, but Obama's election seemed to indicate a step change. In particular, a change that indicated that they were now free to speak out about issues they hadn't previously felt it was safe to speak about.
But the step change didn't actually happen. The system didn't suddenly become fair and evenhanded, and when blacks complained about old injustices what they got was a backlash. Anyone who thought that white supremacy was dying learned that there was a lot more of it than anyone had realized. This backlash resulted in the election of wink-and-nod racist as president, with the full-throated support of lots of open and outspoken white supremacists. The more cynical -- and racist -- blacks took this as confirmation of what they already thought they knew, and the more optimistic blacks felt their hopes crushed.
So I am not in the least bit surprised that blacks are more dissatisfied. They achieved a triumph of progress, only to have their hopes dashed by discovering that it doesn't really mean what they thought it would, and that in fact their situation is even worse than they thought it was. That'll disappoint even the most optimistic.
And how in the world can you possibly equate the dissatisfaction we see today with the open, bald-faced oppression that existed in Jim Crow? That's mind-boggling.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist.
True, but an analysis assuming a purely rational and efficient market would indicate that separate and equal options would have arisen. Sure, trains would have to have separate cars for different races, but it was societal attitudes, not economics, that caused those cars to be so different. Note that the argument that the difference arose from differences in ability to pay doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
The reality in the Jim Crow south was that business owners were expected not only to segregate (as required by law), but also to offer lesser services to blacks. Offering the same level of service would have been legal, but provoked criticism, ostracism and a loss of white business. The market in that case actually selected against equality, because a significant (and relatively wealthy) segment of the customer base actively boycotted businesses that attempted to provide it. Other extra-legal elements of the Jim Crow system, such as restricted access to banks, and the constant sub-rosa threat of judicial or non-judicial violence against uppity blacks ensured that black business ownership was suppressed.
Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market.
Businesses are run by people, and the range of options that those people consider when deciding how to participate in the market are determined by the societal context. I agree that market forces are a powerful mechanism for changing society, and that government really isn't, but what government can do is exactly what it did in the case of the Civil Rights Act... make it illegal to offer differentiated services based on old distinctions that we wish to eliminate. That prevented social pressure from being able to make businesses offer lesser services to blacks.
It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites.
That argument would hold more water if it weren't for the fact that other immigrants, arriving with similar low levels of education and other forms of human capital, climb much faster. I don't completely dismiss the notion that there are elements of black culture in America that are anti-progress, indeed I think it's easy to point out that the bone-deep skepticism of the establishment which prevails in much of black culture (and which is entirely understandable given the history of incredibly-pervasive hypocrisy in that system that was so blatant in the era between reconstruction and the end of Jim Crow, and is still not wholly eliminated) is extremely negative. But I don't think that fully explains the situation today, either, mainly because new black immigrants who arrive without the same cultural baggage, also see retarded progress up the social ladder.
That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed.
And there's a good argument that many federal programs intended to help them succeed are so wrongheaded that they do exactly the reverse as well.
You can't fault the market for that.
I don't fault the market for any of it. The free market is a powerful optimizer that seeks the outcome that customers -- especially the customers with the most money -- want. But when what the monied customers want is social inequality, the market can't fix that. Not by itself.
Note that that isn't the Uber situation. In the Uber situation, most of the money -- investors and customers -- see the sexism and bro culture as a negative. Were the board to take a -- wh
Given how many issues Uber has had with sexism and the "bro culture"
Whether they have such issues or not is none of our business. Do they deliver good service at a good price is what should concern us.
You're certainly welcome to make that your only basis for evaluation. In terms of my day to day transactions, I agree with you. But there are larger issues, and many people do choose to care about them.
I understand the argument that a company that does not discriminate will be more economically effective than one that does, and that over time the former will win and the latter will lose. I even believe it's correct. But we have ample evidence that "over time" doesn't mean a few years, but rather means at least a few generations.
so long as nobody is forced to work there. And no one is — not in this country, not since early 1860-ies
You should read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name. Black slavery was clearly not effectively abolished until the 1940s, not the 1860s. It was reduced, clearly, and the situation has continued to improve, but any evenhanded analysis of the history of blacks in the US serves to support my point that market forces alone are insufficient to fix the inequalities we'd like them to address on any time scale faster than centuries. And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
Yeah let's address sexism and bro culture by making decisions based on stereotypes.
I'm breaking my own policy against replying to ACs (as expressed in my sig), but it's worth it this time. Don't expect me to do it again.
Hell, yes, let's address sexism and bro culture by specifically choosing a CEO that directly counters them. I get the argument that in an ideal world we should be able to just ignore gender, etc., but we manifestly do not live in that world. In many cases it's a good idea to pretend to be what you wish you were, because doing so moves you towards that state. That's great for individuals, but it does not work for societies, because it allows pockets of the "old way" to continue to flourish.
What also doesn't work is to apply stupid affirmative action. Affirmative action is fine, but it can't be of the stupid, counterproductive sort that elevates people into positions which they are not competent to hold, particularly if the problem you're trying to fix is that the people in question are perceived as being incompetent to hold those positions.
But no one with half a brain would argue that Meg Whitman is not competent to be a CEO of a large and growing network-based corporation, since she has done that exact thing before.
So I'm not remotely suggesting a decision "based on stereotypes" here. Instead, selecting Whitman would specifically break with exactly the stereotypes that have been causing problems at Uber. That you could possibly see this as a decision based on the stereotype of women indicates some sort of deep confusion on your part. Or just an inability to think.
Given how many issues Uber has had with sexism and the "bro culture", hiring a female CEO would be a really good idea, IMO. I'm sure Khosrowshahi will be fine, but putting a woman at the head of the company would be a stronger statement. As for Whitman's credentials as CEO, while she hasn't turned in great results at HP I'm not sure that anyone could have done better, and her eBay experience shows she clearly knows how to grow a startup.
Given what we have witnessed on this site in the past 10 years, how can you honestly say that with a straight face?
Perhaps he should say "this aspect of Slashdot isn't going to change". It's an American site, and a primarily American readership. Always has been, and there is no indication that's likely to change. And for better or for worse (mostly worse), Americans use the Imperial system, except when we don't even follow that, e.g. US vs Imperial gallon.
[The history of the gallon difference is kind of interesting. The UK had several definitions of "gallon" including the wine gallon (231 in^3, standardized in 1706), the ale gallon (282 in^3, standardized in 1700), the Winchester gallon (272 in^3, standardized in 1697) and the Irish gallon (217 in^3, standardized in 1495). The US standardized on the wine gallon, and that remains the US gallon today. In 1824 the British established a new Imperial gallon which didn't match any of their previous gallons. It was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62F.
While I'm being pedantic, it's also worth noting that the US gallon wasn't originally well-defined, because the inch wasn't well-defined. The inch was vaguely-defined per the old British definition as the length of three barleycorns, though as of 1814 the canonical inch was a measure stored in the Exchequer chamber in the UK. In 1866, the US inch was defined as 1/39.37th of a meter, which gave it, and therefore the US gallon, a precise measure. In 1959 it was redefined as 1/36th of a yard, which was in turn defined as 0.9144 meters, making the inch exactly 2.54 cm long, and decreasing its length by two millionths, thereby shrinking the gallon by ~6 millionths.
Actually, you can argue that the length of the inch, and hence the gallon, was changed -- or at least clarified -- three more times, when the definition of the meter changed. In 1889 the International Bureau of Weights and Measures replaced the prototype bar in France and created calibrated copies which were distributed around the world. The US received #27, which was calibrated at 0.9999984m ± 0.2 m. That was used to establish the size of the US inch. In 1960 the meter was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange line of krypton-86. Then in 1983 the length of the meter was redefined as the distance traveled by light in vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
This, of course, means that lengths are now defined in terms of time measurements, which raises the question of the definition of a second. The second was defined in 1967 as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium-133 atomic clock. In 1980 this was further clarified to be a clock at mean sea level, and in 1997 clarified again to specify that the cesium atom should be at rest at 0K (which none are, but corrections to measurements of real atoms can be applied). Future refinements in the definition of a second are all but inevitable, especially since the definition of mean sea level is problematic in various ways.
The US survey inch, by the way, is still defined as 1/39.37th of a meter. So a survey mile is about 1/8th of an inch longer than a regular mile. Over long distances, the difference matters.
And, yes, this post is the result of an hour-long tumble into a wiki-hole which started with a desire to find the history of the difference between US and UK gallons.]
I think it's gotten worse. There used to be many more engineers (mostly software, but all sorts) here, and fewer (on a percentage basis) "IT guys". System administration tends to create a skeptical to cynical mindset. I agree that there has always been some reflexive negativity, but I think in the past it was more often offset by the pragmatic mix of optimism and caution that engineers tend to have. Today, if we didn't have the likes of Rei and a handful of others, it would be nothing but negative. If that handful ever bails it will become completely worthless.
I'm sincerely curious about the caliber of people they turn out. I'm perhaps a bit curmudgeonly on this; I think that to be a competent software developer you need to have a pretty thorough grounding in math and science, as well as some native talent... which seems to be far more common in people drawn to math and science. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
Do you really have to have a throughout grounding in math and science to be a software developer? How much math and science is involved in web development, payroll applications, SQL programming, etc?
It's possible to write simple business logic, etc. without any, but if you go at all beyond that, to anything that requires creating your own algorithms, having enough math to be able to think about algorithmic complexity, understand data structure tradeoffs, etc. is critical. I'd say that it's possible to be a code monkey without math, but not a software developer. As for science, perhaps I should have said "engineering" instead, though the relevant concepts are closely related. Science and engineering train you to think rigorously, to develop and test hypotheses. This is very important when you're doing anything novel -- and when debugging.
With both math and science/engineering, it's less about the specific knowledge taught in the courses as it is what you learn about thinking and problem-solving. I've known a few moderately competent coders who had no STEM education, but no really good software engineers. I do know some great people who had very little formal education. They are largely self-taught, but they did learn and can think and talk about number theory, graph theory, information theory, physics, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd definitely rather be on a plane going 500mph than anything else. There's so little to run into up there.
There's even less to run into in a low-pressure, sealed tube. Not even much air. I suppose there are other trains running through the same tube, but tube traffic control is much simpler than air traffic control .
I will not voluntarily have something in my home that constantly spies on me and reports to somebody else.
Do what you like, but you should at least understand what the devices do/don't do. None of the devices currently on the market do what you describe. It's pretty easy to tell that just by watching their network traffic. What they do is to listen constantly for a hotword, using local recognition circuits only. When the hotword is detected, then they start actually listening for your command. I suspect that Google's at least, primarily does command recognition locally, though it also ships a copy of the command off to the cloud for analysis, and storage. You can use the Google Home app to play back everything that it listened to.
Personally, I like my Google Home. I'm annoyed that they nerfed the shopping list in Keep, but the recent addition of phone call support has more than made up for it. It gets used for a lot of different things, including random Google queries (mostly by my boys, to end (briefly) one of their endless debates), questions about weather, traffic, hours that stores are open, etc. I have a Nest thermostat, and controlling that by voice is nice. Oh, and music. More than anything. Especially since I have some Chromecast audio devices connected to various stereos around the house, grouped with the Home, so they all play together. Of course, our phones can do almost all the same things, but the Home is more convenient and seems to do a better job of voice recognition (which is saying something).
I'm not trying to convince you that you should want one. Just pointing out that the "spying" isn't what you claim and there actually is substantial utility.
Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry.
As darkain said above, Google did revolutionize this industry. Gigabit fiber to the home isn't ubiquitous by any means, but when Google Fiber kicked off it was nonexistent. Lots of areas in the country do now have access to it, and I don't think that would have happened without Google jumping in.
Haskell is a language where once you get your program to run at all it usually runs correctly.
That's a dangerous way to even think. Very few bugs are actually programming mistakes- the vast majority, and the harder to fix are design mistakes. Just because it compiles doesn't mean its anywhere close to right.
You haven't used Haskell, I see.
Oh, it's not a panacea by any means. But the nature of the language and its very strict typing really forces you to clarify lots of aspects of your design that you might not think nearly hard enough about in other languages. By the time you get your code to compile it's significantly closer to correct than other languages. Moreover the inherent lack of side effects in functional programming makes writing automated tests of Haskell code a breeze... so if you assume that getting your program to run also includes getting a good suite of automated tests to pass (as it should!), then you really can have pretty high confidence that the code does what you think it does.
Of course, what you think it does may not be what it should do. No programming language can do anything to find bugs in the requirements.
The AC who replied to you makes the same claim about Ada, where it is also true. But it's even more true of Haskell than Ada, IMO. I should mention that I've used both languages only on small projects. Ada has proven to scale well, though, and I suspect Haskell would as well, if you could find enough Haskell programmers to staff a large project.
The previous /. post gave a link to the abstract, which is only three sentences long, here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.034.... The third sentence is "This implies P not equal NP."
Points for style, gotta give him that much. "Other guys demonstrated abstruse technical thing. We demonstrate another variant of abstruse technical thing. This implies P not equal NP."
Of course, he probably could have been even more restrained. I imagine that to people in the field the fact that the monotone and non-monotone network complexities of the clique function having the same bounds obviously implied P != NP, so he could have left the sentence out entirely, which would have been even cooler.
He was talking about P!=NP. Almost no mathematician believes that P=NP. Notable exception: Donald Knuth once expressed your point of view.
As I recall, what Knuth said was that the worst possible solution of the P/NP question would be a non-constructive proof that P=NP. That would tell us that all problems are "easy", but not tell us anything about how to solve them efficiently. It would mean that we could never rely on problems to be hard where we want them to (e.g. cryptography), but wouldn't necessarily give us any insight about how to make them easy.
I don't think he ever expressed the opinion that he thought it likely that P=NP.
I was introduced to the ketogenic diet in March. I was intrigued and thought WTH. If it can help me lose weight then great! What I experienced was SOO much more. I've suffered from adult depression for over 30 years and taken different medications over the years.
There's a growing body of evidence that ketogenic diets help with all sorts of mental illnesses, including those that are much more severe than depression.
If you look back at the start of the low fat movement you will find money. Always follow the money.
This, on the other hand, is utterly useless advice. The problem with the "follow the money" argument is that it can almost always be used to support any side of any argument, depending on how deep you're willing look for the "nefarious manipulation". I mean, I could argue right now that meat producers are getting really worried about vegetarianism and veganism trends, so maybe they're greasing palms to produce all these anti-carb studies. If your response to that claim is "Nuh uh, because ketosis works for me", then you've completely abandoned science and are just following anecdotal evidence, at the mercy of all of your own cognitive biases.
Grease the right palm and viola...saturated fats are the cause of heart disease.
There's absolutely no evidence that any palm-greasing went on.
This has since been completely debunked scientifically.
Your wording makes a much stronger claim than is warranted by the science. What actually has been found in meta-analyses is that there is no evidence that saturated fats increase the risk of heart disease, but the meta-analyses have their own caveats and warnings.
I think a much better approach than attempting to "follow the money", since those paths lead in all directions, is to assume that scientists are working in good faith and providing their best current understanding. Accept that current knowledge is always wrong to some degree, and be conservative about taking radical action based on new studies.
For example, it's entirely possible that some seriously negative effects of a ketogenic diet may be discovered in a few years. That will provoke howls of outrage and complaints about how science is crap, scientists just produce whatever results they're paid for, etc. In the meantime the best thing most of us can do is to maintain a balanced diet, avoiding too much of anything, keeping our caloric intake sufficiently restricted and our activity levels high enough to maintain a reasonable level of fitness.
We have something we call a "court". You can take people there who violate contracts. It's pretty neat, no need to do anything yourself, to repossess the car or install tracking devices, all you do is go there and sue.
Which achieves exactly nothing if the collateral has already been sold and the borrower has no other assets with which to pay.
You say "not planning to prevent it would be foolhardy in the extreme".
Prevention may simply be impossible or cost prohibitive
Which you can't know unless you study and plan.
That being said, messing with YellowStone would have to be approached with great caution. As in old risk-taker me wouldn't touch it.
I think your risk analysis is faulty. It's certain that if we leave Yellowstone alone it will eventually erupt in an explosion that will kill much of the US outright and cause a global climate catastrophe of such scale that it poses a serious existential threat. When that will happen is unknown. We do know that the caldera floor has risen nearly 60 cm in the past 15 years, an order of magnitude more than it did in the preceding 80 years, and the temperature of Yellowstone lake has risen by about 7C. Whether this is just part of a regular cycle or something that presages an eruption we don't know.
Clearly, a lot more study is needed to get enough information to allow us to predict whether an eruption is 100K years away, or imminent. It's worth noting that even very small eruptions are tremendously powerful. One that happened 14K years ago created a 5 km-wide crater. But it makes sense to create plans for preventing an eruption now, in case study does find that an eruption is imminent. The odds are that it is not, but given the extreme damage that would be done by a super eruption, not planning to prevent it would be foolhardy in the extreme.
In Sweden, it's your car even if you paid 0% of the balance. If the car is the collateral, you cannot sell it and you are required to keep a certain level of insurance on the car. If you don't own it, it's considered a lease.
I'm skeptical. Do you mean to say that you actually have the title to the vehicle? If so, how are you prevented from selling it? Is there some system for establishing and tracking liens on vehicles? That seems like it would be complicated and error-prone... real estate is normally handled that way, but that's why we have to have title insurance and all of the complications it entails.
I suspect that it's more like the way it works in the US. When you buy (not lease) a monthly car with a payment, what you're doing is taking a loan for the full unpaid value of the car and fully purchasing the car from the dealer. The bank that lends you the money gets the title to the vehicle, so essentially they own it. When you pay it off, you get the title. Your loan contract specifies the details of how they are or are not allowed to repossess the vehicle, subject to limitations in the law.
No, but I've read more about this than the one article the summary linked to, and there definitely is a risk.
Cite?
Because the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is part of NASA. Which makes sense.
Strictly speaking, threats from Earth aren't their mission, but this particular threat looks a whole lot like other threats they study that are their mission. They are as well equipped to study it as anyone, and it's closely-related to threats that are their mission... so it makes sense that they would do it.
For someone, who offers no citations of his own, it is a tad too rich to demand that of others.
I did, actually. I mentioned an on-topic book, which is very much about economic/racial incentives in the post-reconstruction south. You really should read it.
Life itself is neither fair nor evenhanded.
We don't have to leave things the way we find them, and the inability to reach perfection is no reason not to strive for improvement.
The point was, the government's intervention in the fates of minorities did not achieve its results. It was and remains a failure.
I must have missed where blacks are still slaves (chattel or debt peons), or still segregated.
I'm comparing what we have today with what we would have had, had we simply let the market forces sort things out.
No, you're comparing what we have today with where you fantasize we might have been... in spite of the fact that the market made little progress on fixing the issues in a century. It wasn't until FDR put a stop to the use of trumped up charges to create slaves for hire in the 40s (something he did only to defang Nazi propaganda, actually), and LBJ pushed through and aggressively enforced the Civil Rights Act that significant progress was made.
I'm a strong believer in the power of free market economics, but markets optimize for the desires of the customers with the money, not for overall social good. In most cases, those two things are the same, which is why capitalism has proved to be the best way of providing for everyone. But in some cases, they're not the same. In the south, the customers with money wanted to keep the black man down, and they used both their votes and their dollars to do it.
If you want proof of that, think about what a purely market analysis would predict of an environment in which "separate but equal" was the law, but racial hierarchy was absent. Clearly, business owners would have had economic incentive to compete for both black and white customers in separate sides of their establishment, and would have found it most cost-effective to offer the same goods and service in both. Or if the economic differences in the segregated classes were large enough, they would have offered lesser services to the poorer class, at a lower price. What actually happened was that any white business owner who offered equal treatment or lower prices for blacks would find his white clientele vanishing -- or find his business or home vandalized and himself and his family ostracized. Black-owned businesses were suppressed through other, mostly extra-legal means like redlining and denial of credit (note that a rational, efficient market should have wiped out those practices, but didn't). The customers demanded that blacks be treated as lesser humans, and the market responded accordingly by providing separate and unequal services.
The fact is that the market worked perfectly well, it just didn't produce the outcome that you would like to suppose.
And, yes, the "Jim Crow" laws should've been declared simply unconstitutional — unfortunately for all, the Federal government's intervention went much further than that...
It had to. Merely rolling back the laws would not have affected the intent of the southern states to suppress and oppress blacks. It only removed one method. There were many others which also had to be shut down.
my issues (keys repeating and being unresponsive) were confirmed by Apple service to be hardware problems and the top case got replaced twice free of charge under warranty.
Hmm. I find that if I hit keys off-center they can get stuck down, causing repeats. I also have some non-responsive keys (the arrow keys are the worst). The latter I'm sure are problems with my unit, and repairable. The former seems like a design problem. Do you think it's not?
It's not just the touch bar, they FUBAR'd the entire keyboard. I'm nearly a year into using a MBP 2016 model daily and still make repeated typos due to low keyboard stroke depth. It's like typing on a piece of flat plastic.
+1
I got a 2016 MBP a few months ago, and I find I largely hate it. I like the four USB-C ports, a lot, especially being able to plug power into any of them, as well as being able to use my laptop power adapter to recharge my phone (Pixel XL).
The touch bar... meh. It doesn't really cause me problems, but I definitely don't love it. I might actually like it if they allowed me to configure which (touch bar-unaware) apps should use the touch keys as function keys. For most apps I prefer they have their default functions, to control brightness, volume, etc. But for some apps (most of my dev tools, and some games), I'd like them to automatically become function keys. But they don't.
The keyboard sucks. So much so that I find I really prefer to use the older MBP most of the time. I still have both, and both are actually owned by my employer. I'm supposed to turn the old MBP in soon (though they haven't been bugging me about it... probably because I'm not the only employee underwhelmed by the new model). I'm thinking I may turn the new one in instead.
Nice. So, any analysis that disagrees is automatically not evenhanded
I did not make that claim. If you have reference to good analysis that finds otherwise, cite it.
If anything, that legislation has proven itself a remarkable failure 50 years later. For all the "reverse" racist laws and policies, for all the self-flagellation of the Whites, the dissatisfaction among Blacks is still remarkably high — indeed higher now after the first Black President, than it was before.
Should have left it to the market-forces.
Your conclusion does not follow from your observations, mostly because your observations are very shallow. Also, you are engaging in a blindingly blatant false equivalency. I won't attempt to address all of the problems in your statement, but I'll pick just one: the fact that black dissatisfaction appears to be higher after the first black president was elected. Note that I'm not claiming to offer an authoritative explanation of that fact, but just a plausible explanation which suggests a completely different conclusion than the one you're uncritically assuming.
I think the reason that black dissatisfaction has increased is because blacks saw the election of Obama as a turning point in race relations, as evidence that the country really was ready to listen to their concerns about the extensive and systemic oppression under which they live. Prior to that point, they had focused instead on the slow, steady improvement they were seeing, but Obama's election seemed to indicate a step change. In particular, a change that indicated that they were now free to speak out about issues they hadn't previously felt it was safe to speak about.
But the step change didn't actually happen. The system didn't suddenly become fair and evenhanded, and when blacks complained about old injustices what they got was a backlash. Anyone who thought that white supremacy was dying learned that there was a lot more of it than anyone had realized. This backlash resulted in the election of wink-and-nod racist as president, with the full-throated support of lots of open and outspoken white supremacists. The more cynical -- and racist -- blacks took this as confirmation of what they already thought they knew, and the more optimistic blacks felt their hopes crushed.
So I am not in the least bit surprised that blacks are more dissatisfied. They achieved a triumph of progress, only to have their hopes dashed by discovering that it doesn't really mean what they thought it would, and that in fact their situation is even worse than they thought it was. That'll disappoint even the most optimistic.
And how in the world can you possibly equate the dissatisfaction we see today with the open, bald-faced oppression that existed in Jim Crow? That's mind-boggling.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist.
True, but an analysis assuming a purely rational and efficient market would indicate that separate and equal options would have arisen. Sure, trains would have to have separate cars for different races, but it was societal attitudes, not economics, that caused those cars to be so different. Note that the argument that the difference arose from differences in ability to pay doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
The reality in the Jim Crow south was that business owners were expected not only to segregate (as required by law), but also to offer lesser services to blacks. Offering the same level of service would have been legal, but provoked criticism, ostracism and a loss of white business. The market in that case actually selected against equality, because a significant (and relatively wealthy) segment of the customer base actively boycotted businesses that attempted to provide it. Other extra-legal elements of the Jim Crow system, such as restricted access to banks, and the constant sub-rosa threat of judicial or non-judicial violence against uppity blacks ensured that black business ownership was suppressed.
Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market.
Businesses are run by people, and the range of options that those people consider when deciding how to participate in the market are determined by the societal context. I agree that market forces are a powerful mechanism for changing society, and that government really isn't, but what government can do is exactly what it did in the case of the Civil Rights Act... make it illegal to offer differentiated services based on old distinctions that we wish to eliminate. That prevented social pressure from being able to make businesses offer lesser services to blacks.
It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites.
That argument would hold more water if it weren't for the fact that other immigrants, arriving with similar low levels of education and other forms of human capital, climb much faster. I don't completely dismiss the notion that there are elements of black culture in America that are anti-progress, indeed I think it's easy to point out that the bone-deep skepticism of the establishment which prevails in much of black culture (and which is entirely understandable given the history of incredibly-pervasive hypocrisy in that system that was so blatant in the era between reconstruction and the end of Jim Crow, and is still not wholly eliminated) is extremely negative. But I don't think that fully explains the situation today, either, mainly because new black immigrants who arrive without the same cultural baggage, also see retarded progress up the social ladder.
That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed.
And there's a good argument that many federal programs intended to help them succeed are so wrongheaded that they do exactly the reverse as well.
You can't fault the market for that.
I don't fault the market for any of it. The free market is a powerful optimizer that seeks the outcome that customers -- especially the customers with the most money -- want. But when what the monied customers want is social inequality, the market can't fix that. Not by itself.
Note that that isn't the Uber situation. In the Uber situation, most of the money -- investors and customers -- see the sexism and bro culture as a negative. Were the board to take a -- wh
Whether they have such issues or not is none of our business. Do they deliver good service at a good price is what should concern us.
You're certainly welcome to make that your only basis for evaluation. In terms of my day to day transactions, I agree with you. But there are larger issues, and many people do choose to care about them.
I understand the argument that a company that does not discriminate will be more economically effective than one that does, and that over time the former will win and the latter will lose. I even believe it's correct. But we have ample evidence that "over time" doesn't mean a few years, but rather means at least a few generations.
so long as nobody is forced to work there. And no one is — not in this country, not since early 1860-ies
You should read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name. Black slavery was clearly not effectively abolished until the 1940s, not the 1860s. It was reduced, clearly, and the situation has continued to improve, but any evenhanded analysis of the history of blacks in the US serves to support my point that market forces alone are insufficient to fix the inequalities we'd like them to address on any time scale faster than centuries. And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
Yeah let's address sexism and bro culture by making decisions based on stereotypes.
I'm breaking my own policy against replying to ACs (as expressed in my sig), but it's worth it this time. Don't expect me to do it again.
Hell, yes, let's address sexism and bro culture by specifically choosing a CEO that directly counters them. I get the argument that in an ideal world we should be able to just ignore gender, etc., but we manifestly do not live in that world. In many cases it's a good idea to pretend to be what you wish you were, because doing so moves you towards that state. That's great for individuals, but it does not work for societies, because it allows pockets of the "old way" to continue to flourish.
What also doesn't work is to apply stupid affirmative action. Affirmative action is fine, but it can't be of the stupid, counterproductive sort that elevates people into positions which they are not competent to hold, particularly if the problem you're trying to fix is that the people in question are perceived as being incompetent to hold those positions. But no one with half a brain would argue that Meg Whitman is not competent to be a CEO of a large and growing network-based corporation, since she has done that exact thing before.
So I'm not remotely suggesting a decision "based on stereotypes" here. Instead, selecting Whitman would specifically break with exactly the stereotypes that have been causing problems at Uber. That you could possibly see this as a decision based on the stereotype of women indicates some sort of deep confusion on your part. Or just an inability to think.
Given how many issues Uber has had with sexism and the "bro culture", hiring a female CEO would be a really good idea, IMO. I'm sure Khosrowshahi will be fine, but putting a woman at the head of the company would be a stronger statement. As for Whitman's credentials as CEO, while she hasn't turned in great results at HP I'm not sure that anyone could have done better, and her eBay experience shows she clearly knows how to grow a startup.
Slashdot isn't going to change
Given what we have witnessed on this site in the past 10 years, how can you honestly say that with a straight face?
Perhaps he should say "this aspect of Slashdot isn't going to change". It's an American site, and a primarily American readership. Always has been, and there is no indication that's likely to change. And for better or for worse (mostly worse), Americans use the Imperial system, except when we don't even follow that, e.g. US vs Imperial gallon.
[The history of the gallon difference is kind of interesting. The UK had several definitions of "gallon" including the wine gallon (231 in^3, standardized in 1706), the ale gallon (282 in^3, standardized in 1700), the Winchester gallon (272 in^3, standardized in 1697) and the Irish gallon (217 in^3, standardized in 1495). The US standardized on the wine gallon, and that remains the US gallon today. In 1824 the British established a new Imperial gallon which didn't match any of their previous gallons. It was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62F.
While I'm being pedantic, it's also worth noting that the US gallon wasn't originally well-defined, because the inch wasn't well-defined. The inch was vaguely-defined per the old British definition as the length of three barleycorns, though as of 1814 the canonical inch was a measure stored in the Exchequer chamber in the UK. In 1866, the US inch was defined as 1/39.37th of a meter, which gave it, and therefore the US gallon, a precise measure. In 1959 it was redefined as 1/36th of a yard, which was in turn defined as 0.9144 meters, making the inch exactly 2.54 cm long, and decreasing its length by two millionths, thereby shrinking the gallon by ~6 millionths.
Actually, you can argue that the length of the inch, and hence the gallon, was changed -- or at least clarified -- three more times, when the definition of the meter changed. In 1889 the International Bureau of Weights and Measures replaced the prototype bar in France and created calibrated copies which were distributed around the world. The US received #27, which was calibrated at 0.9999984m ± 0.2 m. That was used to establish the size of the US inch. In 1960 the meter was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange line of krypton-86. Then in 1983 the length of the meter was redefined as the distance traveled by light in vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
This, of course, means that lengths are now defined in terms of time measurements, which raises the question of the definition of a second. The second was defined in 1967 as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium-133 atomic clock. In 1980 this was further clarified to be a clock at mean sea level, and in 1997 clarified again to specify that the cesium atom should be at rest at 0K (which none are, but corrections to measurements of real atoms can be applied). Future refinements in the definition of a second are all but inevitable, especially since the definition of mean sea level is problematic in various ways.
The US survey inch, by the way, is still defined as 1/39.37th of a meter. So a survey mile is about 1/8th of an inch longer than a regular mile. Over long distances, the difference matters.
And, yes, this post is the result of an hour-long tumble into a wiki-hole which started with a desire to find the history of the difference between US and UK gallons.]
I think it's gotten worse. There used to be many more engineers (mostly software, but all sorts) here, and fewer (on a percentage basis) "IT guys". System administration tends to create a skeptical to cynical mindset. I agree that there has always been some reflexive negativity, but I think in the past it was more often offset by the pragmatic mix of optimism and caution that engineers tend to have. Today, if we didn't have the likes of Rei and a handful of others, it would be nothing but negative. If that handful ever bails it will become completely worthless.
Can you break down what's provided in O vs what's needed for the ultimate goal?
Not with any degree of confidence. Someone on the Treble team could. I'm sure I'd get it wrong, so it's probably better that I not guess.
Has anyone worked with boot camp graduates?
I'm sincerely curious about the caliber of people they turn out. I'm perhaps a bit curmudgeonly on this; I think that to be a competent software developer you need to have a pretty thorough grounding in math and science, as well as some native talent... which seems to be far more common in people drawn to math and science. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
Do you really have to have a throughout grounding in math and science to be a software developer? How much math and science is involved in web development, payroll applications, SQL programming, etc?
It's possible to write simple business logic, etc. without any, but if you go at all beyond that, to anything that requires creating your own algorithms, having enough math to be able to think about algorithmic complexity, understand data structure tradeoffs, etc. is critical. I'd say that it's possible to be a code monkey without math, but not a software developer. As for science, perhaps I should have said "engineering" instead, though the relevant concepts are closely related. Science and engineering train you to think rigorously, to develop and test hypotheses. This is very important when you're doing anything novel -- and when debugging.
With both math and science/engineering, it's less about the specific knowledge taught in the courses as it is what you learn about thinking and problem-solving. I've known a few moderately competent coders who had no STEM education, but no really good software engineers. I do know some great people who had very little formal education. They are largely self-taught, but they did learn and can think and talk about number theory, graph theory, information theory, physics, etc.