Knuth actually said something about you, "The idea that people knew a thing or two in the '70s is strange to a lot of young programmers."
You have a serious reading comprehension problem. I never said people from the 70s were stupid. All I said is that we know more now than we did before, and doing things when you have more knowledge and better tools leads to better results. This shouldn't even be controversial.
I seriously, seriously doubt it.
You should doubt it. You've never even seen my programming abilities. Most programmers are shit, and they all think they are amazing.
But if the thing that convinces you that I am a bad programmer is that I think that programming now is better than the 70s, you are retarded.
Or they could just interpret arms to mean body parts. Since we don't give a shit about the constitution anyway, why legitimize it by amending it properly.
I think I'd rather be in a gun fight with a crazy person than a knife fight.
I would much rather the police be fighting this guy. But it will probably be about 15 minutes before they arrive, and I'd like to have more than my front door to protect me until they arrive.
The moral of your story for me is that I should buy a gun. I don't currently own one, but me deciding not to own one doesn't make the crazy person any less likely to own one.
Even if I was in favor of complete gun criminalization, I should own the most lethal gun I can legally own for my own protection, which if I got my wish would be no gun at all
It has nothing to do with conservatism. You don't think liberals own guns too? It's an issue of timing. The police can't get to your house instantly. If you live in a place with almost no crime, that may be fine for you. If you live in a place where muggings and murders are common, owning a gun is probably not a bad idea, especially since police are usually less motivated to provide protection in violent areas (for whatever reason).
I personally would rather have both options. I would like the option of using a gun until the police arrive. I always have the option not to take it out if it seems like it might aggravate the situation. It's not hard to keep a gun in a hidden safe where it is not accessible to children or easily found or stolen by criminals.
BTW I should mention that I am not a conservative and I do not own a gun.
Actually the most commonly quoted statistic is that "You are more likely to be a victim of gun violence if you own a gun". The implication is that you are more likely to be shot with your own gun than protecting yourself with it. This may be true, but that statistic is misleading. It correlates gun ownership with murder rates. It does not demonstrate a causal link between owning a gun and likelihood of being murdered.
This actually makes complete sense. People in violent areas are more likely to be murdered with a gun. Because they live in a dangerous area, they are also more likely to own a gun for protection. I haven't seen any statistics on the likelihood of being shot with your own gun (although I'm sure it's out there). I think the real conclusion is, If you feel threatened enough to own a gun, you are probably in an area dangerous enough where you are more likely to be murdered, and owning a gun is not likely to help.
The difference is that murder is always bad, and guns are only bad when they lead to murder. Guns can even potentially prevent murder, which is the entire reason police have them.
Murder is impossible to prevent, but the reason it is illegal is because it is bad in itself, not that it sometimes leads to something else that is bad.
You can be a good person and a gun owner. You can't be a good person and a murderer.
Similar claims have been made about drugs. Why are drugs illegal? Because if you use drugs you will resort to mugging people for drug money. Drugs in themselves aren't bad. The muggings are bad. But muggings should be criminalized regardless of their motivation, and it is also quite possible for people to use drugs without resorting to unjustly harming others.
While saying "People are still going to do it" is not a good justification for keeping something legal. Similarly, saying "But they might do something bad with it" is not a good justification for making possession of something illegal.
There is absolutely a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates. The question is whether gun onwnership causes higher murder rates, or whether this is *only* a correlation.
The soldiers that join the armed forces are heroes. That doesn't mean that they aren't being used to further the goals of corporations at the expense of those soldiers, their families, and foreign civilians.
I would say we absolutely should have an armed guard at every school, if they were not as rare as they are. The reason we don't have armed guards at schools is because there is no rational incentive to shoot up a school. We need guards for the president because he's a target for assassination. We need guards at banks because they are a target for thieves. Schools are safe. We are overreacting to the high profile but rare school shootings that happen. Kids are far more likely to die in a car accident than in a school shooting.
The NRA represents the firearms industry. They are currently on the same side as the firearms industry customers (i.e. NRA members) because for the moment the firearms industry is on the same side as their customers. Once people are able to print their own designs or worse print out copyrighted/patented designs downloaded off the internet, we will see how much the firearms industry likes their own customers. We will also see if the NRA will take the side of the industry or their members. My guess will be that it takes the side of whoever gives them more money.
I can see quality in some old programs relative to other old programs. I don't see why this is so hard for you to understand. I even laid out a few examples. Do you understand what "by today's standards" means?
I am not wrong at all.
If I wrote a program today the way programs were written in the 70s (even good programs), I would be a bad programmer because I would not be leveraging the best tools for the job. My programming would be worse than that of good programmers who used the best tools available today. My program will undoubtedly be better work than modern bad programs, but it can't be better than modern good programs, in the same way that a P-51 can't compete with even a mediocre modern fighter jet.
There is always code that's relatively good considering the tools that were available at any given time. I doubt that if it were written today that it would have been done exactly the same way.
There are always examples of software that was good for it's time. Super mario bros was a great game for it's time. It is a shining example of how to make a great video game. It will always be a classic game. If it was released today, it would be regarded as a giant turd. I am not saying tex is a turd. I am saying that there are examples of better coding that tex from worse engineers because of new tools that became available after tex was made.
There are several factors which lead to the quality of what you can make. One is relative talent. Another is the tools available to you.
Yes the field of programming is continuing to advance, but if you look back far enough, you'll see that previously accepted programming practices are now discouraged. For example we discourage goto, global variables, method static variables (thread safety), etc). However, there are many practices that were developed in the 90's that are still encouraged today.
For example, at my job we still use the Go4 design patterns book (1994) and the Meyers books for coding style (1996). Yes new stuff is coming out, but programming practices form the mid 90s is still good 10 years after the fact. This is not true of older methodologies.
Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
This is a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that every single programmer becomes better with age, this doesn't mean older programmers are better than young programmers. Younger programmers can (and actually do) get better faster, because they are educated in a time with better tools and methodologies. The bar is higher now than it was before.
There were some really smart mathematicians back in ancient greece, like euclid. Now we teach highschool kids what it took Euclid to figure out over the course of his entire life. Is an average high school kid a batter mathematician than Euclid? No not really, but that's only because we put everything into historical perspective. An average college kid can do calculus, which was invented 2000 years after Euclid died, and in that sense an average college kid is better at "doing math" (not necessarily discovering math) than Euclid, simply by virtue of having learned math in a time of greater knowledge.
"Commanding a salary" means that employers *must* pay you your commanded salary because if they don't you will just work for someone who will, due the high demand for your unique skill.
If employers are able to lower demand for your unique skill, simply by spreading vague rumors, then I would say your command of your salary is weak.
The problem is that programming was a rapidly changing field up until a few decades ago.
It simply wasn't possible to be a good programmer (by today's standards) in the 1970's. You could be a good programmer for the time. Many of those people have kept current with new design methodologies and many haven't. The ones that haven't kept up, continue to think of themselves as badass programmers who know everything, when in reality the world has just passed them by.
It is not that old people are bad programmers. It is that people who learned how to program before the field of programming really matured tended to have "stone age" tools and didn't always keep up to date. As time passes, the "old programmers" are changing. I am 33. People considered "old" are not even that much older than me. They had a much different experience learning to program. They didn't learn to program in "the wild west" like some of the really old programmers. Many received formal training at universities where they learned a lot of the theory of computing. They also benefited for learning in a time when more was known about how to program in a way that minimizes mistakes and increases scalability, maintainability, etc.
The end result is that the best option for tmobile customers is a contract free plan. You are not forced into a contract. Granted you are not forced into contract at other carriers either but in those cases the contract free plans are much worse than the contract plans.
A new restaurant says "We have vegetarian food now". It turns out they still have meat dishes. Alice points out that although they still have meat dishes, they now have vegetarian options. Bob says, yeah but even KFC has vegetarian food by that logic. Does the restaurant have to eliminate all meat from it's menu to claim to be a vegetarian restaurant? I don't know. I do know that there are certain restaurants that really try to have good vegetarian food even if they still serve meat. I would say T-Mobile is a "contract free" friendly carrier, in the sense that people who didn't want contracts might actually want to be customers there. They still offer contracts to meat eaters, but the main focus is on contract free vegetarian food.
No there are monthly plans with other providers. I suppose the difference is that the monthly plans on T-Mobile are actually good deals. Where as on other carriers, the monthly plans are bad deals. You are paying almost as much for a monthly plan as a monthly payment on a 2 year service plan. You are basically paying "phone subsidy prices" without even getting a "free" phone.
The only reason you'd do a monthly plan on verizon or AT&T is if knew you only wanted service for a couple months.
On T-Mobile their monthly contract free plan is the "normal" plan they offer now. My monthly bill for my portion of my T-mobile family plan is $32 for voice and unlimited 4G data. Other people on my family plan are paying $22 for voice and 2GB of 4G data.
It's a pretty sweet deal. My Monthly bill for 5 people is $130.month. My girlfriend by herself was paying $90/month at AT&T before she switched.
Does "no contracts" mean "You *can* get service without a contract" or does it mean "It is impossible to get stuck in any contract".
It is pretty obvious that they mean the former. The only way to offer the latter is to remove the *option* to pay for your phone over 2 years and force every customer to pay for their phone up front.
This is a better system because it gives customers more options.
Also I'm fairly sure that they explain to people that they are signing a contract to pay for their phone when they give you an iphone (something that retails for like $600) for $99. It's just not a service contract. It's a loan contract.
It is a contract. It is a contract to pay for the phone over the course of 2 years. The thing that T-Mobile has done is separated the service contract from the phone. You can have a monthly service plan (contract free). You can buy a phone from them, or bring your own phone that you purchased elsewhere. You also have the option of receiving a phone and a loan from them if you sign a contract to pay it back over 2 years.
You can cancel your service any time without a termination fee. You are not able to get out of your agreement to pay for the phone they gave you.
This is orders of magnitude better than what other carriers do. They force you to pay for a new phone with a 2 year service plan whether you get one or not. So everyone gets their "free phone" (that they are already obligated to pay for), and they are also stuck with the same service provider for the next 2 years.
At least with T-mobile you can switch to another carrier. You can even sell your phone on ebay to try to recoup some of the costs if you don't want it anymore.
T-mobile no longer packages phone subsidies with contracts. In fact they don't even really do contracts anymore. You just pay a monthly rate for a single or family plan. You can buy a phone from them or just provide your own, it doesn;t matter to them.
I have a t-mobile value family plan with 5 people (2 year contract, but we brought our own phones). Each persons share is $22/month if they get 2GB of data, and $32/month if they have unlimited.
I bought a nexus 4 16GB for $350 from google, 3 people have a nexus S, and one Iphone 4s from AT&T
But that's efficiency of "The Market". That's not "efficient allocation of resources". Not the same thing.
The efficiency of the market leads to efficiency of allocation of resources. This is pretty standard Adam Smith kind of stuff. I don;t know why this would even be a point of contention. It seems obvious to me that markets are facilitating the allocation of resources by deciding winners and losers.
HFT adds market liquidity. Market liquidity is good.
Does HFT causes positive feedback loops? I would say in general it doesn't, but there can be some short term positive feedback loops that eventually get corrected. I mean who lost all the money from the recent crash? If you are right that HFTs caused it, then it was all the HFTs that sold low just after the crash anticipating it would go even lower. Regular investors didn't have enough time to lose money.
I don't think the evidence is conclusive. It seems that there are a lot of cases of HFTs preventing market swings.
I still don't see any real harm that HFTs have done. The increase liquidity and *may* be the cause of some very short term crashes that have no significant effect on long term investment.
HFTs don't need perfect algorithms. There just needs to be a lot of different algorithms out there, to prevent big crashes and bubbles.
Slashdot Mirror
Knuth actually said something about you, "The idea that people knew a thing or two in the '70s is strange to a lot of young programmers."
You have a serious reading comprehension problem. I never said people from the 70s were stupid. All I said is that we know more now than we did before, and doing things when you have more knowledge and better tools leads to better results. This shouldn't even be controversial.
I seriously, seriously doubt it.
You should doubt it. You've never even seen my programming abilities. Most programmers are shit, and they all think they are amazing.
But if the thing that convinces you that I am a bad programmer is that I think that programming now is better than the 70s, you are retarded.
Or they could just interpret arms to mean body parts. Since we don't give a shit about the constitution anyway, why legitimize it by amending it properly.
I think I'd rather be in a gun fight with a crazy person than a knife fight.
I would much rather the police be fighting this guy. But it will probably be about 15 minutes before they arrive, and I'd like to have more than my front door to protect me until they arrive.
The moral of your story for me is that I should buy a gun. I don't currently own one, but me deciding not to own one doesn't make the crazy person any less likely to own one.
Even if I was in favor of complete gun criminalization, I should own the most lethal gun I can legally own for my own protection, which if I got my wish would be no gun at all
You seem to be pretty afraid of guns. Maybe you should be, but both sides are playing the politics of fear.
It has nothing to do with conservatism. You don't think liberals own guns too? It's an issue of timing. The police can't get to your house instantly. If you live in a place with almost no crime, that may be fine for you. If you live in a place where muggings and murders are common, owning a gun is probably not a bad idea, especially since police are usually less motivated to provide protection in violent areas (for whatever reason).
I personally would rather have both options. I would like the option of using a gun until the police arrive. I always have the option not to take it out if it seems like it might aggravate the situation. It's not hard to keep a gun in a hidden safe where it is not accessible to children or easily found or stolen by criminals.
BTW I should mention that I am not a conservative and I do not own a gun.
Actually the most commonly quoted statistic is that "You are more likely to be a victim of gun violence if you own a gun". The implication is that you are more likely to be shot with your own gun than protecting yourself with it. This may be true, but that statistic is misleading. It correlates gun ownership with murder rates. It does not demonstrate a causal link between owning a gun and likelihood of being murdered.
This actually makes complete sense. People in violent areas are more likely to be murdered with a gun. Because they live in a dangerous area, they are also more likely to own a gun for protection. I haven't seen any statistics on the likelihood of being shot with your own gun (although I'm sure it's out there). I think the real conclusion is, If you feel threatened enough to own a gun, you are probably in an area dangerous enough where you are more likely to be murdered, and owning a gun is not likely to help.
The difference is that murder is always bad, and guns are only bad when they lead to murder. Guns can even potentially prevent murder, which is the entire reason police have them.
Murder is impossible to prevent, but the reason it is illegal is because it is bad in itself, not that it sometimes leads to something else that is bad.
You can be a good person and a gun owner. You can't be a good person and a murderer.
Similar claims have been made about drugs. Why are drugs illegal? Because if you use drugs you will resort to mugging people for drug money. Drugs in themselves aren't bad. The muggings are bad. But muggings should be criminalized regardless of their motivation, and it is also quite possible for people to use drugs without resorting to unjustly harming others.
While saying "People are still going to do it" is not a good justification for keeping something legal. Similarly, saying "But they might do something bad with it" is not a good justification for making possession of something illegal.
There is absolutely a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates. The question is whether gun onwnership causes higher murder rates, or whether this is *only* a correlation.
The soldiers that join the armed forces are heroes. That doesn't mean that they aren't being used to further the goals of corporations at the expense of those soldiers, their families, and foreign civilians.
I would say we absolutely should have an armed guard at every school, if they were not as rare as they are. The reason we don't have armed guards at schools is because there is no rational incentive to shoot up a school. We need guards for the president because he's a target for assassination. We need guards at banks because they are a target for thieves. Schools are safe. We are overreacting to the high profile but rare school shootings that happen. Kids are far more likely to die in a car accident than in a school shooting.
The NRA represents the firearms industry. They are currently on the same side as the firearms industry customers (i.e. NRA members) because for the moment the firearms industry is on the same side as their customers. Once people are able to print their own designs or worse print out copyrighted/patented designs downloaded off the internet, we will see how much the firearms industry likes their own customers. We will also see if the NRA will take the side of the industry or their members. My guess will be that it takes the side of whoever gives them more money.
I am an amazing programmer.
I am not wrong at all. If I wrote a program today the way programs were written in the 70s (even good programs), I would be a bad programmer because I would not be leveraging the best tools for the job. My programming would be worse than that of good programmers who used the best tools available today. My program will undoubtedly be better work than modern bad programs, but it can't be better than modern good programs, in the same way that a P-51 can't compete with even a mediocre modern fighter jet.
There is always code that's relatively good considering the tools that were available at any given time. I doubt that if it were written today that it would have been done exactly the same way.
There are always examples of software that was good for it's time. Super mario bros was a great game for it's time. It is a shining example of how to make a great video game. It will always be a classic game. If it was released today, it would be regarded as a giant turd. I am not saying tex is a turd. I am saying that there are examples of better coding that tex from worse engineers because of new tools that became available after tex was made.
There are several factors which lead to the quality of what you can make. One is relative talent. Another is the tools available to you.
Yes the field of programming is continuing to advance, but if you look back far enough, you'll see that previously accepted programming practices are now discouraged. For example we discourage goto, global variables, method static variables (thread safety), etc). However, there are many practices that were developed in the 90's that are still encouraged today.
For example, at my job we still use the Go4 design patterns book (1994) and the Meyers books for coding style (1996). Yes new stuff is coming out, but programming practices form the mid 90s is still good 10 years after the fact. This is not true of older methodologies.
Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
This is a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that every single programmer becomes better with age, this doesn't mean older programmers are better than young programmers. Younger programmers can (and actually do) get better faster, because they are educated in a time with better tools and methodologies. The bar is higher now than it was before.
There were some really smart mathematicians back in ancient greece, like euclid. Now we teach highschool kids what it took Euclid to figure out over the course of his entire life. Is an average high school kid a batter mathematician than Euclid? No not really, but that's only because we put everything into historical perspective. An average college kid can do calculus, which was invented 2000 years after Euclid died, and in that sense an average college kid is better at "doing math" (not necessarily discovering math) than Euclid, simply by virtue of having learned math in a time of greater knowledge.
"Commanding a salary" means that employers *must* pay you your commanded salary because if they don't you will just work for someone who will, due the high demand for your unique skill.
If employers are able to lower demand for your unique skill, simply by spreading vague rumors, then I would say your command of your salary is weak.
The problem is that programming was a rapidly changing field up until a few decades ago.
It simply wasn't possible to be a good programmer (by today's standards) in the 1970's. You could be a good programmer for the time. Many of those people have kept current with new design methodologies and many haven't. The ones that haven't kept up, continue to think of themselves as badass programmers who know everything, when in reality the world has just passed them by.
It is not that old people are bad programmers. It is that people who learned how to program before the field of programming really matured tended to have "stone age" tools and didn't always keep up to date. As time passes, the "old programmers" are changing. I am 33. People considered "old" are not even that much older than me. They had a much different experience learning to program. They didn't learn to program in "the wild west" like some of the really old programmers. Many received formal training at universities where they learned a lot of the theory of computing. They also benefited for learning in a time when more was known about how to program in a way that minimizes mistakes and increases scalability, maintainability, etc.
The end result is that the best option for tmobile customers is a contract free plan. You are not forced into a contract. Granted you are not forced into contract at other carriers either but in those cases the contract free plans are much worse than the contract plans.
A new restaurant says "We have vegetarian food now". It turns out they still have meat dishes. Alice points out that although they still have meat dishes, they now have vegetarian options. Bob says, yeah but even KFC has vegetarian food by that logic. Does the restaurant have to eliminate all meat from it's menu to claim to be a vegetarian restaurant? I don't know. I do know that there are certain restaurants that really try to have good vegetarian food even if they still serve meat. I would say T-Mobile is a "contract free" friendly carrier, in the sense that people who didn't want contracts might actually want to be customers there. They still offer contracts to meat eaters, but the main focus is on contract free vegetarian food.
No there are monthly plans with other providers. I suppose the difference is that the monthly plans on T-Mobile are actually good deals. Where as on other carriers, the monthly plans are bad deals. You are paying almost as much for a monthly plan as a monthly payment on a 2 year service plan. You are basically paying "phone subsidy prices" without even getting a "free" phone.
The only reason you'd do a monthly plan on verizon or AT&T is if knew you only wanted service for a couple months.
On T-Mobile their monthly contract free plan is the "normal" plan they offer now. My monthly bill for my portion of my T-mobile family plan is $32 for voice and unlimited 4G data. Other people on my family plan are paying $22 for voice and 2GB of 4G data.
It's a pretty sweet deal. My Monthly bill for 5 people is $130.month. My girlfriend by herself was paying $90/month at AT&T before she switched.
I think you can do that.
Does "no contracts" mean "You *can* get service without a contract" or does it mean "It is impossible to get stuck in any contract".
It is pretty obvious that they mean the former. The only way to offer the latter is to remove the *option* to pay for your phone over 2 years and force every customer to pay for their phone up front.
This is a better system because it gives customers more options.
Also I'm fairly sure that they explain to people that they are signing a contract to pay for their phone when they give you an iphone (something that retails for like $600) for $99. It's just not a service contract. It's a loan contract.
It is a contract. It is a contract to pay for the phone over the course of 2 years. The thing that T-Mobile has done is separated the service contract from the phone. You can have a monthly service plan (contract free). You can buy a phone from them, or bring your own phone that you purchased elsewhere. You also have the option of receiving a phone and a loan from them if you sign a contract to pay it back over 2 years.
You can cancel your service any time without a termination fee. You are not able to get out of your agreement to pay for the phone they gave you.
This is orders of magnitude better than what other carriers do. They force you to pay for a new phone with a 2 year service plan whether you get one or not. So everyone gets their "free phone" (that they are already obligated to pay for), and they are also stuck with the same service provider for the next 2 years.
At least with T-mobile you can switch to another carrier. You can even sell your phone on ebay to try to recoup some of the costs if you don't want it anymore.
T-mobile no longer packages phone subsidies with contracts. In fact they don't even really do contracts anymore. You just pay a monthly rate for a single or family plan. You can buy a phone from them or just provide your own, it doesn;t matter to them.
I have a t-mobile value family plan with 5 people (2 year contract, but we brought our own phones). Each persons share is $22/month if they get 2GB of data, and $32/month if they have unlimited.
I bought a nexus 4 16GB for $350 from google, 3 people have a nexus S, and one Iphone 4s from AT&T
T-Mobile is definitely the way to go.
Really? My girlfriend just switched her AT&T iphone over to my T-Mobile family plan. It works fine.
But that's efficiency of "The Market". That's not "efficient allocation of resources". Not the same thing.
The efficiency of the market leads to efficiency of allocation of resources. This is pretty standard Adam Smith kind of stuff. I don;t know why this would even be a point of contention. It seems obvious to me that markets are facilitating the allocation of resources by deciding winners and losers.
HFT adds market liquidity. Market liquidity is good.
Does HFT causes positive feedback loops? I would say in general it doesn't, but there can be some short term positive feedback loops that eventually get corrected. I mean who lost all the money from the recent crash? If you are right that HFTs caused it, then it was all the HFTs that sold low just after the crash anticipating it would go even lower. Regular investors didn't have enough time to lose money.
I don't think the evidence is conclusive. It seems that there are a lot of cases of HFTs preventing market swings.
I still don't see any real harm that HFTs have done. The increase liquidity and *may* be the cause of some very short term crashes that have no significant effect on long term investment.
HFTs don't need perfect algorithms. There just needs to be a lot of different algorithms out there, to prevent big crashes and bubbles.