Re:favorite quote: discovery of debugging
on
Debugging
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· Score: 4, Funny
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes, 1949
55 years later, programmers are still spending a large part of their lives finding bugs and fixing them...
Even worse, they're probably still spending time finding and fixing bugs this Wilkes guy introduced...
Those who know a particular tool well (eg, Excel, Matlab, SPSS, Mathematica) tend to keep using that tool, even if it is not well-suited. This means you get abberations like Matlab programs that control real-time experiments and LabView programs that do higher-order mathematics.
Speaking of aberrations, check out my (inappropriately named) sendmail for Matlab script. It doesn't get more aberrated than that!
A true Bayesian filter, wow. Let's face it, statistical classifiers based von Bayes' formula are not really state of the art. They make false assumptions about the data (independence of features).
Bullshit. Bayes' formula is exact, and makes no assumption on independence whatsoever. Naive Bayesian approaches make independence assumptions, hence the use of the term naive.
The only inherent drawback in using Bayes' rule in classifiers is that you have to assume the number of classes to be known a priori.
"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness."
"As almost all links indirectly point to the Radikal articles we can abolish the web now."
The ruling states that, although the links themselves were indirect, they were accompanied by detailed instructions on how to locate the pages in question. It was this combination which the judge ruled illegal, not the actual link per se.
This aspect should go down well with the Code=Speech crowd: source code (in this case a direct link) is essentially the same as a description/poem/diagram describing same.
Took me a while to realize that this was the University of Virgina instead of the University of Amsterdam (also abbreviated UVA), which has a computer museum as well.
Slashdot Mirror
55 years later, programmers are still spending a large part of their lives finding bugs and fixing them...
Even worse, they're probably still spending time finding and fixing bugs this Wilkes guy introduced...
Nothing like submitting a story, only to find it posted when you get back to the main page.
Don't worry, your submission of this story will be on the front page tomorrow.
Joris
Speaking of aberrations, check out my (inappropriately named) sendmail for Matlab script. It doesn't get more aberrated than that!
Joris
Worst. Sig. Ever.
Surely you mean Joke instead of Sig?
"Yes. The Mouse Problem. This week 'The World Around Us' looks at the growing social phenomenon of Mice and Men. What makes a man want to be a mouse."
JPZ
A true Bayesian filter, wow. Let's face it, statistical classifiers based von Bayes' formula are not really state of the art. They make false assumptions about the data (independence of features).
Bullshit. Bayes' formula is exact, and makes no assumption on independence whatsoever. Naive Bayesian approaches make independence assumptions, hence the use of the term naive.
The only inherent drawback in using Bayes' rule in classifiers is that you have to assume the number of classes to be known a priori.
JPZ
"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness."
- from Johny Mnemonic by William Gibson
The ruling states that, although the links themselves were indirect, they were accompanied by detailed instructions on how to locate the pages in question. It was this combination which the judge ruled illegal, not the actual link per se.
This aspect should go down well with the Code=Speech crowd: source code (in this case a direct link) is essentially the same as a description/poem/diagram describing same.
Took me a while to realize that this was the University of Virgina instead of the University of Amsterdam (also abbreviated UVA), which has a computer museum as well.
Contrary to the statements made in the article, they work just fine in Mozilla as well! (At least under WinNT).
Great to see Mozilla catching up to Explorer....