Because it's easy to mistake one's personal biases for sound judgment about what is "good".
I won't sit here and defend every design decision in javascript, but it's a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. I think of it more like Lisp than Java; it encourages (among skilled programmers) a functional programming style, which turns out to be both under-used as a programming paradigm and very nicely fitted to the kind of event-driven tasks people use javascript for.
If you aren't writing higher order functions in javascript (functions that take functions as values or return them as values) you aren't fluent in javascript and aren't qualified to pass judgment on it.
And once we've done in "platform", we can start the campaign against "system". By the time we're done engineers will only be able to talk about software using mime.
I've noticed a tendency recently of adjectives being pared down to adjectival nouns. At first it was just Republican politicians talking about the the "Democrat Party", but it seems to have spread all over the place. I was at truck stop last year which boasted "artisan egg breakfast sandwiches"; my reaction was that I'd rather take the artisan egg home and see what hatched out.
Err... Humans can't have aspirin anymore? Granted it's become less popular for pain relief now that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are available, but plenty of people are taking baby aspirin regularly for heart attack and stroke prevention.
In my experience, the most important emotional stance to have with respect to code is to care about the people who will depend upon that code. If you make their success your success, you will make the right decisions by them.
You needn't even legalized *everything*. You could legalize a reasonable cross section of relatively safe recreational drugs so that people could have the kinds of experiences they're seeking without having to become an armchair toxicologist.
Let us assume for the moment that intelligence is a single thing that can be precisely described by a single number.
Now imagine nobody has invented a way of measuring that number yet, so you set out to create an IQ test. You put together a number of tests and tasks, and assign various weights to each question and score. You administer the test to a bunch of people and the results seem reasonable.
Here's the question: how do you know you are actually measuring intelligence, and not something else that approximately correlates with it?
Alfred Binet, when faced with this problem, validated his test by correlating it with school achievement. This, at least, ensured that the test was at least somewhat useful in predicting school achievement. But it should be obvious that different kinds of people thrive in different kinds of schools, so at best tests calibrated this way are imprecise. We've all known underachievers and overachievers in school.
At their very best, IQ tests tell us what we expect to hear. That's actually more useful than it sounds, as long as we remember that we've calibrated the test to do just that. Test results must be *contrived* to correlate with things we're interested in. That mightinclude stuff like algebra and geometry, and arguing as in a legal brief, which are all valuable mental tasks. But it might not correlate to stuff like finding food in a forest during an unseasonable drought, or negotiating with a neighboring group, or evaluating the motives of strangers, all of which are tasks requiring mental acuity, and at which people differ in talent.
Using that argument, you could rip out CSS support altogether and save even more kLoCs. Every feature presents a practical problem to the maintainer; the question is the effect a feature has on the users.
Like I said, if practically nobody needs the feature, that's a strong argument for the old heave-ho. But the beef with regions seems to be that the feature is ugly and awkward, which it undoubtedly is.
It seems to me that a pragmatic willingness to force HTML to do what it's not particularly good at has been the key to its long term success -- not architectural purity.
I can see how regions doesn't fit in with the overarching theme of content/formatting separation of CSS3, but while it's unquestionably ugly philosophically, it's unclear to me how much of a *practical* problem that actually is. If you don't need CSS regions, then you can simply not use it and be every bit as pure as if the feature never existed at all.
On the other hand, if you *do* need the capability of CSS Regions, mixing postscript into your workflow, user experience, and site management seems like a very poor substitute to be able to do everything in HTML and CSS.
I think a reasonable case could be made that the number of people who need this feature is sufficiently small that given the complexity maintaining the feature, it's not worth keeping. However CSS Regions being aesthetically offensive seems a very weak justification for becoming *less* compliant with the standard.
By the way, the video above shows the second generation keyboard. The infamous "chiclet" keboard had no labels on the keycaps. The letter labels were on the surface of the keyboard between rows of keys, in order to permit overlays. That was a clever idea, but it wasn't going to fly in an era where mechanical switch keyboards were the norm.
Of course today crummy keyboards are the norm; I bet the second generation PCJr keyboard beats what most people are using these days.
I don't think this is entirely right. You'd see this scavenging behavior in modern hunter gatherer societies.
I think we tend to conflate a lot of things that nature of course does not, e.g. health and longevity with local carrying capacity. Paleolithic humans were evidently a very healthy bunch, judging from the skeletons they left behind. They were slightly taller than humans are today, and had a life expectancy that was unequalled until the 20th Century. This is indicative of a very high quality diet.
The thing you get with agriculture is the ability to support a larger population within a fixed area. With that you get all the stuff that requires scale: specialization in occupations, social stratification, and the power that comes with controlling a fixed population.
Well I *have* read the book and actually Viktor Frankenstein was *not* a doctor. He's an undergraduate *student* of natural philosophy who gets sidetracked into occult studies. He only became a doctor in the movies, which give the whole affair an anti-science spin, probably to cash in on peoples discomfort with anatomical research. The book is much less clear on exactly how Frankenstein constructs his monster, but it implies alchemy or other discredited pseudoscience is involved.
Sure... except we had our shares of total or partial failures in our unmanned space program too. The first *six* lunar probes in the 1960's Ranger program failed. We lost Mariners 3 and 8 and Mars Observer. Oh, and we cocked up Hubble's primary mirror because somebody installed a test jig backward, which shows how big missions depend on countless small things to go right.
Anyhow it's too early to count Jade Rabbit out. Glitches are a fairly regular feature of space missions, if you follow them. It's still quite possible they'll fiddle the thing back into operation.
Well, the issue seems to be that they don't want to share their visitors with the computing museum next door which has important exhibits relating to the work at Bletchley Park. That seems awfully petty.
Oh, really? Maybe that has to do with the attitude people have towards public services. There are world class public schools in the US, but by in large they aren't in places like Kentucky.
I didn't struggle with combinatorics, because I took the late Gian-Carlo Rota's infamously difficult 18.313 at MIT (one of the great math teachers of all time, by the way). I didn't struggle with graph theory, linear algebra or abstract algebra either. However, that level of ease would not be typical of a *high school student*. I *did* find computation theory and analysis of algorithms very challenging -- more challenging than differential equations. I'm not talking about basic data structures and algorithms, which is a very easy course, but rather the more analytic stuff.
As for CLRS, if you think it's all easy, you haven't cracked any of the intermediate to advanced topics in it. Sure, network traversal algorithms happen to be easy, but dynamic programming is not.
Underfund K12 general education but send money to try to teach your illiterate, mathematically incompetent students computer science. I'm sure Ballmer and Bezos have wet dreams of armies of intellectually complaint code monkeys.
Speaking as someone who actually *has* a computer science degree, the CS you can teach to someone who is not intellectually prepared is just code monkey stuff. Real CS is quite mentally challenging, and requires a strong grounding in mathematics. It requires some creative thinking too, which is something you can't expect a college student to manifest after a lifetime of intellectual impoverishment.
However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later.
One of the alleged provisions of the arrangement was to punish companies that reneged on the deal by targeting its key engineers for recruitment. At that point what you have is regulation by cartel. This, by the way, was what government *was* before the advent of the modern democratic republic state. An aristocracy may spend nearly all of its time fighting itself tooth-and-nail, but it closes ranks against outsiders.
Oddly enough, state of the art drones cost as much as pre-stealth attack planes such as the A10 or F16 (adjusted for inflation). While not endangering a pilot is a huge advantage, a $16.9 million MQ-9 is not something you're going to put in harm's way casually -- to say nothing of a $227 million RQ-4 Global Hawk.
We're still a long way from replacing manned aircraft. Although no doubt we'll get there in the end, it won't be soon enough that the failure of the F35 wouldn't matter, especially if the Air Force retires the A10.
...And since collusion is natural behavior in situations like this for company managers, it follows that in order for a market to be free, the behavior of its participants must be regulated.
Which, seriously speaking, is a rather interesting point.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's easy to mistake one's personal biases for sound judgment about what is "good".
I won't sit here and defend every design decision in javascript, but it's a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. I think of it more like Lisp than Java; it encourages (among skilled programmers) a functional programming style, which turns out to be both under-used as a programming paradigm and very nicely fitted to the kind of event-driven tasks people use javascript for.
If you aren't writing higher order functions in javascript (functions that take functions as values or return them as values) you aren't fluent in javascript and aren't qualified to pass judgment on it.
And once we've done in "platform", we can start the campaign against "system". By the time we're done engineers will only be able to talk about software using mime.
I've noticed a tendency recently of adjectives being pared down to adjectival nouns. At first it was just Republican politicians talking about the the "Democrat Party", but it seems to have spread all over the place. I was at truck stop last year which boasted "artisan egg breakfast sandwiches"; my reaction was that I'd rather take the artisan egg home and see what hatched out.
Err... Humans can't have aspirin anymore? Granted it's become less popular for pain relief now that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are available, but plenty of people are taking baby aspirin regularly for heart attack and stroke prevention.
In my experience, the most important emotional stance to have with respect to code is to care about the people who will depend upon that code. If you make their success your success, you will make the right decisions by them.
You needn't even legalized *everything*. You could legalize a reasonable cross section of relatively safe recreational drugs so that people could have the kinds of experiences they're seeking without having to become an armchair toxicologist.
Let us assume for the moment that intelligence is a single thing that can be precisely described by a single number.
Now imagine nobody has invented a way of measuring that number yet, so you set out to create an IQ test. You put together a number of tests and tasks, and assign various weights to each question and score. You administer the test to a bunch of people and the results seem reasonable.
Here's the question: how do you know you are actually measuring intelligence, and not something else that approximately correlates with it?
Alfred Binet, when faced with this problem, validated his test by correlating it with school achievement. This, at least, ensured that the test was at least somewhat useful in predicting school achievement. But it should be obvious that different kinds of people thrive in different kinds of schools, so at best tests calibrated this way are imprecise. We've all known underachievers and overachievers in school.
At their very best, IQ tests tell us what we expect to hear. That's actually more useful than it sounds, as long as we remember that we've calibrated the test to do just that. Test results must be *contrived* to correlate with things we're interested in. That mightinclude stuff like algebra and geometry, and arguing as in a legal brief, which are all valuable mental tasks. But it might not correlate to stuff like finding food in a forest during an unseasonable drought, or negotiating with a neighboring group, or evaluating the motives of strangers, all of which are tasks requiring mental acuity, and at which people differ in talent.
Using that argument, you could rip out CSS support altogether and save even more kLoCs. Every feature presents a practical problem to the maintainer; the question is the effect a feature has on the users.
Like I said, if practically nobody needs the feature, that's a strong argument for the old heave-ho. But the beef with regions seems to be that the feature is ugly and awkward, which it undoubtedly is.
It seems to me that a pragmatic willingness to force HTML to do what it's not particularly good at has been the key to its long term success -- not architectural purity.
I can see how regions doesn't fit in with the overarching theme of content/formatting separation of CSS3, but while it's unquestionably ugly philosophically, it's unclear to me how much of a *practical* problem that actually is. If you don't need CSS regions, then you can simply not use it and be every bit as pure as if the feature never existed at all.
On the other hand, if you *do* need the capability of CSS Regions, mixing postscript into your workflow, user experience, and site management seems like a very poor substitute to be able to do everything in HTML and CSS.
I think a reasonable case could be made that the number of people who need this feature is sufficiently small that given the complexity maintaining the feature, it's not worth keeping. However CSS Regions being aesthetically offensive seems a very weak justification for becoming *less* compliant with the standard.
Interesting, but I have no idea what I'm looking at.
By the way, the video above shows the second generation keyboard. The infamous "chiclet" keboard had no labels on the keycaps. The letter labels were on the surface of the keyboard between rows of keys, in order to permit overlays. That was a clever idea, but it wasn't going to fly in an era where mechanical switch keyboards were the norm.
Of course today crummy keyboards are the norm; I bet the second generation PCJr keyboard beats what most people are using these days.
I don't think this is entirely right. You'd see this scavenging behavior in modern hunter gatherer societies.
I think we tend to conflate a lot of things that nature of course does not, e.g. health and longevity with local carrying capacity. Paleolithic humans were evidently a very healthy bunch, judging from the skeletons they left behind. They were slightly taller than humans are today, and had a life expectancy that was unequalled until the 20th Century. This is indicative of a very high quality diet.
The thing you get with agriculture is the ability to support a larger population within a fixed area. With that you get all the stuff that requires scale: specialization in occupations, social stratification, and the power that comes with controlling a fixed population.
Well I *have* read the book and actually Viktor Frankenstein was *not* a doctor. He's an undergraduate *student* of natural philosophy who gets sidetracked into occult studies. He only became a doctor in the movies, which give the whole affair an anti-science spin, probably to cash in on peoples discomfort with anatomical research. The book is much less clear on exactly how Frankenstein constructs his monster, but it implies alchemy or other discredited pseudoscience is involved.
Sure... except we had our shares of total or partial failures in our unmanned space program too. The first *six* lunar probes in the 1960's Ranger program failed. We lost Mariners 3 and 8 and Mars Observer. Oh, and we cocked up Hubble's primary mirror because somebody installed a test jig backward, which shows how big missions depend on countless small things to go right.
Anyhow it's too early to count Jade Rabbit out. Glitches are a fairly regular feature of space missions, if you follow them. It's still quite possible they'll fiddle the thing back into operation.
However, there are an awful lot of True Believers who act as though it were.
Weasel words.
Well, the issue seems to be that they don't want to share their visitors with the computing museum next door which has important exhibits relating to the work at Bletchley Park. That seems awfully petty.
Oh, really? Maybe that has to do with the attitude people have towards public services. There are world class public schools in the US, but by in large they aren't in places like Kentucky.
Here's something to think about. Society doesn't educate you for *your* benefit. Not really.
And making schoolwork interesting is important, but as a means, not an end.
I didn't struggle with combinatorics, because I took the late Gian-Carlo Rota's infamously difficult 18.313 at MIT (one of the great math teachers of all time, by the way). I didn't struggle with graph theory, linear algebra or abstract algebra either. However, that level of ease would not be typical of a *high school student*. I *did* find computation theory and analysis of algorithms very challenging -- more challenging than differential equations. I'm not talking about basic data structures and algorithms, which is a very easy course, but rather the more analytic stuff.
As for CLRS, if you think it's all easy, you haven't cracked any of the intermediate to advanced topics in it. Sure, network traversal algorithms happen to be easy, but dynamic programming is not.
Even educated people make typos.
Underfund K12 general education but send money to try to teach your illiterate, mathematically incompetent students computer science. I'm sure Ballmer and Bezos have wet dreams of armies of intellectually complaint code monkeys.
Speaking as someone who actually *has* a computer science degree, the CS you can teach to someone who is not intellectually prepared is just code monkey stuff. Real CS is quite mentally challenging, and requires a strong grounding in mathematics. It requires some creative thinking too, which is something you can't expect a college student to manifest after a lifetime of intellectual impoverishment.
However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later.
One of the alleged provisions of the arrangement was to punish companies that reneged on the deal by targeting its key engineers for recruitment. At that point what you have is regulation by cartel. This, by the way, was what government *was* before the advent of the modern democratic republic state. An aristocracy may spend nearly all of its time fighting itself tooth-and-nail, but it closes ranks against outsiders.
Oddly enough, state of the art drones cost as much as pre-stealth attack planes such as the A10 or F16 (adjusted for inflation). While not endangering a pilot is a huge advantage, a $16.9 million MQ-9 is not something you're going to put in harm's way casually -- to say nothing of a $227 million RQ-4 Global Hawk.
We're still a long way from replacing manned aircraft. Although no doubt we'll get there in the end, it won't be soon enough that the failure of the F35 wouldn't matter, especially if the Air Force retires the A10.
I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me.
And how would you judge whether a company is underpaying you? By comparing what the company offers you to the *market price*.
What the CEOs stand accused of is colluding to depress the market price for engineering labor.
Collusion, by definition, is not a free market.
...And since collusion is natural behavior in situations like this for company managers, it follows that in order for a market to be free, the behavior of its participants must be regulated.
Which, seriously speaking, is a rather interesting point.