What do you do when you plug your tablet in a docking station and start using it with multiple displays, a keyboard and a mouse?
I have no idea. In probably 4-5 years of owning tablet-style devices, I have never once connected them to any external peripherals like that, nor wanted to.
Tablets are for convenient data access and occasional very light data entry. For the stuff that needs multiple displays and serious input devices, I have other tools that are much, much better at it than any tablet ever produced.
In other words, my use cases (and going by the Internet commentary, almost everyone else's use cases too) are completely different for tablets and real PCs. It makes absolutely no sense to run the same style of operating system on both of them -- not just the shell, but the file system, the process model, the security model, connectivity...
This is a perfect example of just what I meant: the organization would had been better off if Bob had just done his job and left the system unsupported, thus forcing the managament to formally give the responsibility to someone - which also means it's an officially acknowledged role within the organization.
But this makes all kinds of unstated assumptions, most obviously that management would in fact be forced to formally recognise the responsibility and to find or hire someone to do every useful little job that ever gets done. This is completely unrealistic. In practice, probably only the technical staff and maybe their technical leads or immediate line managers know these little details about how the jobs are being done. Even if more senior management were aware of them, the administrative overheads of documenting every last aspect of every job are prohibitive, no-one has the budget to hire dedicated staff for all of these things, and you'd spend forever trying to recruit idealised candidates where you knew for sure they had exactly the right balance of skills to fill the gaps in your team.
The kind of person who wants to run their department this way is the kind of person who says things like "Everything needs to be managed" and "You can't manage what you can't measure", yet is completely blind to the overheads their policies impose on the department as a whole and would apparently prefer to know exactly how fast their project is failing under the weight of those overheads than to let their people get on with their work and have the project succeed.
The simple, brutal fact is that from the organization's point of view, Bob is a liability. He might die, he might leave. The more responsibility he gets, the bigger liability he'll become.
That's a very strange argument, though it's not the first time I've seen it made. If Bob leaving for whatever reason would be a loss, then the work he was doing was valuable, and not letting him do it just guarantees you'll suffer the same loss voluntarily.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that no organisation should ever hire anyone with something unique to offer or let anyone make a useful contribution that is outside their formal job description. You should only hire completely unremarkable people and if you accidentally hire anyone with any sort of aptitude or ability you didn't expect and a willingness to use it to perform better, you should immediately suppress that instinct.
Good luck competing against any organisation that actually hires talent and rewards initiative with that policy -- you'll need it. But probably not for very long.
True enough. It's always mildly amusing when someone criticizes a programming language for having features that let a programmer hide behaviour... and then advocates using macros in C instead.
This is all true, but I'm not sure how it's any different to almost any other popular language.
Java and C# have also evolved a lot of new language features in recent years. For many types of software, the way the code looks will also be heavily influenced by which libraries and frameworks are used in that project's stack.
It's the same story for web development. We have different flavours of JavaScript (ES5 in most browsers today, but ES6 just around the corner and supporting a wider range of programming styles), Python (2 vs 3), and so on. And with these more dynamic languages, the style is often even more guided by a framework if you're using one.
Even if you're not using pervasive third party frameworks or libraries, any project of non-trivial size is going to adopt its own conventions and build its own abstractions to suit its particular needs, and then the rest of its code will again become its own dialect written in terms of those conventions and abstractions.
In fact, I can't think of any mainstream language except for C that doesn't suffer from the "dialect" problem to some extent. And that's because C is a 20th century language in a 21st century world, so lacking in expressive power that it can't support any of these modern, high-productivity development styles and abstraction tools. Its ubiquity, portability and simplicity are assets, but they are effectively its only redeeming features in 2015, and as time goes by it will be necessary for fewer and fewer projects to choose C for those reasons.
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup
"If you attack a tool based primarily on not liking the people who use it, you're still just a bigot, no matter how famous you are." -- Anonymous Slashdot poster
I think I disagree with literally everything you wrote there.
Mediocre people are easily replaceable, and most projects don't really need any real talent.
For one thing, any programmer who isn't starting at a beginner level will have a unique blend of skills and experience, just like anyone in any creative profession. They'll think about problems in their own way, influenced by the different projects and ideas they've worked with before, and sometimes that experience will lead them to a different and possibly better solution than any of their colleagues would have conceived.
So, even if you can easily hire another Python developer with two years of professional experience when Bob leaves, are you really sure those six months Bob previously spent at Acme Software Inc didn't make him your team's expert on the new source control system they've been migrating to for the past couple of months? When Jim arrives to replace Bob, did the people recruiting him understand the important supporting function Bob performed and make sure that Jim will be able to take over that responsibility as well?
The principle that programmers should simply be interchangeable resources is one of those fictions that managers and HR people who don't understand creative work believe because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy and powerful inside, but the real world doesn't work that way. You always run into these side issues in any established development team, at any level of experience beyond the most entry-level positions. Almost no-one is truly irreplaceable in business, but almost any creative professional will also be unique in some respects and there will be hidden costs if you try to casually interchange them.
Chances are you aren't going to be the next Google, so why pay for the skills that can build one?
Because paying for a good programmer over a mediocre one will be cost-effective for almost any software development organisation? Good programmers can be dramatically more productive than mediocre ones in just about everything they do, and typically the extra cost to hire them isn't even close to proportionate to that extra productivity.
You don't have to be making the next Google, solving difficult CS problems and racing to get first-mover advantage in your market. You just have to be making software where every bug that makes it into production is going to cost you a lot of money to fix, or where shipping sooner means bringing in revenues sooner.
Of course there are some problems that only a sufficiently skilled programmer will be able to solve at all. But even doing more routine work, a good programmer produces better quality code faster than a mediocre programmer in almost any context. Also, if you're putting together a team, having a few good programmers instead of many mediocre ones disproportionately reduces communication and management overheads.
One of the things that fascinates me about this debate -- in a sickening, slow-motion train-wreck-watching kind of way -- is how inherently biased the participants often seem to be.
For example, try rereading just the summary and comments on this page and counting how many references are specifically to US/American citizens. Does no-one who is not a US citizen deserve to be treated with respect, considered innocent until proven guilty, and protected by law against infringements of their basic rights and freedoms? Does no-one who is a US citizen ever do anything bad? Does anyone really think the passport someone carries -- basically an accident of birth -- is the most reliable indicator of future intentions?
Usually at this point someone pipes up with how the NSA is there to protect US interests, but that argument holds little water. If the NSA is undermining communication security to monitor others then it is undermining security for US citizens as well. And the same for GCHQ here in the UK, and every other state surveillance apparatus. So by the national interest argument, at best every state surveillance organisation in the world except possibly your own is a threat to your basic freedoms and every other nation in the world is acting like a hostile power in some sort of information-age Cold War.
This is clearly an absurd default position. International partnerships and friendships can be mutually beneficial in numerous ways, and we should be working together to develop those relationships for the good of everyone in our increasingly global society. And yet, the current obsession with intrusive surveillance and security theatre is threatening many of those potential benefits in all kinds of subtle ways, and the only news stories about international diplomacy in recent years seem to be about shady back-room deals that further the interests of state power and/or big business, often conveniently circumventing the normal safeguards provided by national laws in the process.
I don't think this position is sustainable, but my worry is that it will eventually fail not because we decided like civilised people that this kind of behaviour is unhealthy and unacceptable, but because it created so much of a them-and-us divide between normal people and powerful organisations like governments and big businesses that we reached a point of widespread civil disobedience or even actual civil war, causing catastrophically vast damage to society for at least a generation and out of all proportion to any threat these measures ever protected against.
In any sensible company doing technical recruitment, HR (and Legal) aren't even involved until a relatively late stage in the proceedings, to ensure that the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed. Of course, there aren't that many sensible companies when it comes to technical recruitment.:-(
If you have HR as your front-line recruitment organisation, you are almost doomed to mediocrity. Very few good candidates actually change jobs by replying to that kind of ad and playing the HR skills database lottery, so you have eliminated many of the people you would most like to hire before you start.
For a start, as with an unfortunate number of academic studies, it appears that the sample population consisted of undergraduates and recent graduates. That alone completely invalidates any conclusions as they might apply to experienced professionals with better judgement about when and how to use refactoring techniques.
Even without that, there seem to be a number of fundamental concerns about the data.
One obvious example is that they consider lines of code to be a metric that tells you anything useful beyond the width you need to allow for the line number margin in your text editor. I doubt most experienced programmers would agree that a LOC count in isolation tells us anything useful about maintainability or that the mere fact that LOC went up or down after a change necessarily meant the code had become better or worse in any useful sense.
Another concern is that they talk about "analysability", but this seems to be measured only by reference to a brief examination of a small code base in one of two versions, unrefactored and refactored. I'd like to know what the actual code looked like before I read anything at all into that data -- what refactoring was performed, what was the motivation for each change, and how do they know those two small code bases were representative of either refactoring in general or the effectiveness of refactoring on larger code bases or code bases that developers have more time to study and work with?
I'm all for empirical data -- goodness knows, we need more objective information about what really works in an industry as hype-driven and accepting of poor quality as ours -- but I'm afraid this particular study seems to be so flawed that it really tells us very little of value.
It remains the case that either my original statement is true, meaning a counter-example for the reliability of fact-based ranking has been identified, or my original statement is false, in which case the statement itself becomes a counter-example because it is widely repeated but incorrect.
Erm... It was intended to be ironic. Well, paradoxical, technically. Compare my final sentence
Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.
with the classic "This statement is false".
If my statement were true, it would illustrate a problem with Google's proposal.
But as my statement is false, it is itself a demonstration of the problem, because it perpetuates a myth sufficiently popular that it even has its own Wikipedia page. I was a little surprised that I couldn't also find it on Snopes.
Anyway, it's disappointing that no-one seems to have noticed that. Were none of you even a little suspicious about a post that in one paragraph said "Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct" and then repeated one of the most popular myths there is? Really?
Ah, yes, an excellent follow-up, presented with great subtlety: any writing that makes its point through hyperbole, analogy, figurative imagery, or indeed any other style that isn't literally, objectively, factually, 100% correct could also suffer. Well played, fellow Slashdotter.
"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...
And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.
Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.
It had better hope so, because giving entire TLDs to specific big companies could easily be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of the rest of the world accepting US-led administration of the general Internet. There's plenty of scepticism already, but organisations like ICANN are tolerated because frankly no-one has much of a better idea or wants to take on the responsibility. However, it is not difficult to think of a better idea than letting big businesses rewrite the established rules in arguably the most important address space in the world today for their own benefit.
I tend to agree about the icons, but I do think flat design is particularly bad in this respect. By its nature, it removes tools that could otherwise be used for distinguishing different types of content, establishing hierarchy, and directing the user to important details.
The Microsoft style of flat as seen here isn't as bad as the more extreme "monochrome line art" version that is plaguing web sites at the moment. Even so, all those subtle lighting-based effects we used to see, and even the not-so-subtle styling of say Apple's older metallic or aqua looks, could serve practical purposes as well as creating a signature style for a platform.
The thing that really hit me about the screenshot was how crowded it looks. The example is presenting information with a clear underlying structure (a file system) and a small number of actions I can take, and probably half the area of that window is empty space. And yet, my immediate reaction is that there's no clear structure to tell me where to look, and the design desperately needs more visual hierarchy and better use of whitespace.
Of course, this is a recurring problem with the current trend for flat designs, bright colour schemes with limited contrast, and very rectilinear graphics and layout. It's still disappointing that Microsoft seems to be chasing Apple and Google down that blind alley, though, instead of coming up with something more interesting, distinctive, and most importantly, usable.
Here in the UK, our journalism professional doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in its ability to police itself. As you may be aware, we just had a long and very public judge-led enquiry into press behaviour, including some of the outright criminal actions that some parts of the media engaged in to get their stories. At least one newspaper collapsed as a result, and several industry heavyweights are doing jail time. So I'm not sure appealing to journalistic ethics over the law of the land is any better as a strategy for promoting the responsible use of protected speech.
To the meat of it, the only thing I can gather is that you want to somehow ensure that everyone's identity is available and verifiable on every comment.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that if you are actively claiming a certain level of protected qualification, you should actually have it.
This is quite orthogonal to the issue of anonymity, which IMHO is a much harder one simply because someone who can't be identified is self-evidently immune from prosecution but as you rightly point out anonymity has also been a positive influence on many of the most significant breakthroughs in recent history. There are clearly both genuine pros and genuine cons to anonymous speech.
It's true that if we allow anonymity then someone could claim false qualifications even if doing so is illegal. However, I think we are slowly learning as a society not to trust everything we read on the Internet when we don't know the source, and this somewhat mitigates the damage.
I challenged you to provide just one example of censorship working, and you came up empty (again).
Here are a few places where a degree of censorship might be morally justifiable -- not saying it necessarily is, but there's enough of an argument for reasonable debate:
Protection of individual privacy
Innocent until proven guilty
Operational details of genuine military/security activities
Advertising aimed at minors or other vulnerable people
Advertising prescription-only medication to non-prescribers
Political advertising by artificial legal entities (businesses etc.)
As a matter of law, various first world jurisdictions do in fact take different positions on some of these issues today.
Once again, I don't think anyone here is disputing that censorship is fundamentally a nasty and potentially very damaging idea. I think the rational debate is about whether things like spreading misinformation, infringing privacy, and taking advantage of the vulnerable are worse.
The theory of our amendments is such that if a person is accused of a crime there should be no journalism which presents an opinion of guilt until the Jury has done it's job.
That seems a reasonable principle, which is probably in the interests of justice. But how is it not a restriction on free speech? Is this not just another form of censorship? I haven't brought this situation up myself, but if I'd been pushed for more examples of free speech vs. privacy issues and why I believe privacy should be given more weight in our modern, highly connected world, this would have been one of the first examples I would have given.
Then who do you propose be the arbiter of who can comment and on what topics?
Are we back to on-line discussions again now? If so, then I haven't proposed any general limitation on who may comment, only that when doing so people shouldn't be able to claim protected qualification or authority that they do not legitimately possess.
To me, that is still a restriction on absolute freedom of speech, but a justifiable one. I see no general need to protect malicious liars from the harmful consequences of their actions under colour of defending free speech. Others here seem to feel this isn't a freedom of speech issue but more a matter of fraud, which to me just seems like quibbling over semantics, but maybe their views and mine aren't so different after all and we just frame the argument in slightly different ways. Perhaps protecting speech yet punishing its consequences is a particularly US way of looking at the issue, like framing the debate in terms of the First Amendment rather than any specific moral, ethical or practical motivation?
How do you propose that the system does not become corrupt like our allegedly free democracies?
The qualifications are awarded by peers through an open, transparent process. As I commented elsewhere, that is the best system I know of for recognising any particular qualification or authority. It's not perfect, but to defeat it you have to corrupt the entire expert body in a field, and if you can do that then the field has no value anyway.
If you claim to want control, there must be a controlling entity.
But that controlling entity doesn't have to be part of the government, any more than we have courts that make determinations of guilt or innocence based on the whim of the Powers That Be rather than people being tried by juries of their peers.
Censorship can not be implemented without corruption, and though repeatedly attempted in history it has _ONLY_ resulted in damage to society. Never has censorship been implemented in a positive way, because it can't be implemented in a positive way.
I'm not so sure. Censorship is a very dangerous thing, and if you said that free speech should only be obstructed when it is necessary to protect other fundamental principles, I'd be the first to agree.
But I don't accept your premise that anything resembling censorship is automatically a bad thing in any context. People lie, with damaging consequence. Even when they aren't lying, you can't force people to tell the whole truth, and a half-truth may be worse than saying nothing at all. You also can't give everyone the power to speak with an equal voice, but otherwise reasonable arguments about defeating negative speech by countering rationally with a more positive alternative tend to assume a right to reply exists, which of course it doesn't in practice. Unless you're going to physically compel everyone to provide such a right of reply, which you can't because it's completely impractical, you have only traded one form of censorship for another anyway.
Consider those things in the context of, say, modern political systems, and you can immediately explain much of the corruption we see in the world today. Consider them in the context of a specialised profession like medicine, and you can immediately explain a lot of problems in the US healthcare industry.
Same thing with libel and slander - it is the fraud that is being punished, not the speech.
That may be true as a technicality, depending on how your local laws are written, but what difference does it make in practice? Either you are free to say something defamatory about someone else or you are not. If you will be punished for saying something fraudulent, you are still not free to say that thing without legal consequence.
That is why there is more freedom for people in the United States than other countries like France or Germany.
An interesting example. In Europe, we tend to favour individual privacy over free speech to a greater degree than the US does, perhaps because in Europe -- and particularly in countries such as those you mentioned -- we still have living memory of what can happen if privacy is not sufficiently protected.
Unfortunately, requiring certification — as seems to be your proposal — will continue to allow those same politicians to control, just who is free to call themselves a "subject matter expert".
Why? The politicians don't award higher degrees and professional qualifications. Generally, within regulated industries, these matters are adjudicated by more experienced peers. In the absence of any absolute truth, I don't know of any better way to run such a system than open peer review.
Sure, in principle you could undermine that system and corrupt the whole thing, but to do that you'd have to undermine the entire community to the extent that established participants almost unanimously agreed with your distorted vision rather than their own previous convictions. If you can do that in a profession important enough to regulate in the first place then you have much, much bigger things to worry about.
No-one exists in a vacuum. At some point you have to trust that someone working in a complicated field who has been recognised as competent by their peers through an open process actually does know what they're doing. The damage from political meddling happens when things like the "by their peers" and "open process" parts get forgotten.
Calling me names doesn't negate my arguments or make yours any stronger.
On your first point, while yelling "Everyone kill that guy" might not make everyone kill that guy, offering a substantial reward for doing so might. This is why crimes based on incitement and conspiracy exist.
On your second point, I don't see what alternative hypotheses about a particular scientific theory have to do with unqualified subjective opinions expressed in on-line comments. No-one is suggesting that scientists can't propose alternative theories about how the universe works, or for that matter that censorship is generally a good thing, so I don't know why you keep responding as if they are.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you do when you plug your tablet in a docking station and start using it with multiple displays, a keyboard and a mouse?
I have no idea. In probably 4-5 years of owning tablet-style devices, I have never once connected them to any external peripherals like that, nor wanted to.
Tablets are for convenient data access and occasional very light data entry. For the stuff that needs multiple displays and serious input devices, I have other tools that are much, much better at it than any tablet ever produced.
In other words, my use cases (and going by the Internet commentary, almost everyone else's use cases too) are completely different for tablets and real PCs. It makes absolutely no sense to run the same style of operating system on both of them -- not just the shell, but the file system, the process model, the security model, connectivity...
This is a perfect example of just what I meant: the organization would had been better off if Bob had just done his job and left the system unsupported, thus forcing the managament to formally give the responsibility to someone - which also means it's an officially acknowledged role within the organization.
But this makes all kinds of unstated assumptions, most obviously that management would in fact be forced to formally recognise the responsibility and to find or hire someone to do every useful little job that ever gets done. This is completely unrealistic. In practice, probably only the technical staff and maybe their technical leads or immediate line managers know these little details about how the jobs are being done. Even if more senior management were aware of them, the administrative overheads of documenting every last aspect of every job are prohibitive, no-one has the budget to hire dedicated staff for all of these things, and you'd spend forever trying to recruit idealised candidates where you knew for sure they had exactly the right balance of skills to fill the gaps in your team.
The kind of person who wants to run their department this way is the kind of person who says things like "Everything needs to be managed" and "You can't manage what you can't measure", yet is completely blind to the overheads their policies impose on the department as a whole and would apparently prefer to know exactly how fast their project is failing under the weight of those overheads than to let their people get on with their work and have the project succeed.
The simple, brutal fact is that from the organization's point of view, Bob is a liability. He might die, he might leave. The more responsibility he gets, the bigger liability he'll become.
That's a very strange argument, though it's not the first time I've seen it made. If Bob leaving for whatever reason would be a loss, then the work he was doing was valuable, and not letting him do it just guarantees you'll suffer the same loss voluntarily.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that no organisation should ever hire anyone with something unique to offer or let anyone make a useful contribution that is outside their formal job description. You should only hire completely unremarkable people and if you accidentally hire anyone with any sort of aptitude or ability you didn't expect and a willingness to use it to perform better, you should immediately suppress that instinct.
Good luck competing against any organisation that actually hires talent and rewards initiative with that policy -- you'll need it. But probably not for very long.
No, anyone concerned with performance will write the code first, profile and then optimize.
Absolutely. That's why any good C++ programmer writes
void some_function(big_class data)
first, and only uses
void some_function(const big_class & data)
after profiling confirms that their code is as slow as everyone knew it would be.
True enough. It's always mildly amusing when someone criticizes a programming language for having features that let a programmer hide behaviour... and then advocates using macros in C instead.
This is all true, but I'm not sure how it's any different to almost any other popular language.
Java and C# have also evolved a lot of new language features in recent years. For many types of software, the way the code looks will also be heavily influenced by which libraries and frameworks are used in that project's stack.
It's the same story for web development. We have different flavours of JavaScript (ES5 in most browsers today, but ES6 just around the corner and supporting a wider range of programming styles), Python (2 vs 3), and so on. And with these more dynamic languages, the style is often even more guided by a framework if you're using one.
Even if you're not using pervasive third party frameworks or libraries, any project of non-trivial size is going to adopt its own conventions and build its own abstractions to suit its particular needs, and then the rest of its code will again become its own dialect written in terms of those conventions and abstractions.
In fact, I can't think of any mainstream language except for C that doesn't suffer from the "dialect" problem to some extent. And that's because C is a 20th century language in a 21st century world, so lacking in expressive power that it can't support any of these modern, high-productivity development styles and abstraction tools. Its ubiquity, portability and simplicity are assets, but they are effectively its only redeeming features in 2015, and as time goes by it will be necessary for fewer and fewer projects to choose C for those reasons.
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup
"If you attack a tool based primarily on not liking the people who use it, you're still just a bigot, no matter how famous you are." -- Anonymous Slashdot poster
I think I disagree with literally everything you wrote there.
Mediocre people are easily replaceable, and most projects don't really need any real talent.
For one thing, any programmer who isn't starting at a beginner level will have a unique blend of skills and experience, just like anyone in any creative profession. They'll think about problems in their own way, influenced by the different projects and ideas they've worked with before, and sometimes that experience will lead them to a different and possibly better solution than any of their colleagues would have conceived.
So, even if you can easily hire another Python developer with two years of professional experience when Bob leaves, are you really sure those six months Bob previously spent at Acme Software Inc didn't make him your team's expert on the new source control system they've been migrating to for the past couple of months? When Jim arrives to replace Bob, did the people recruiting him understand the important supporting function Bob performed and make sure that Jim will be able to take over that responsibility as well?
The principle that programmers should simply be interchangeable resources is one of those fictions that managers and HR people who don't understand creative work believe because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy and powerful inside, but the real world doesn't work that way. You always run into these side issues in any established development team, at any level of experience beyond the most entry-level positions. Almost no-one is truly irreplaceable in business, but almost any creative professional will also be unique in some respects and there will be hidden costs if you try to casually interchange them.
Chances are you aren't going to be the next Google, so why pay for the skills that can build one?
Because paying for a good programmer over a mediocre one will be cost-effective for almost any software development organisation? Good programmers can be dramatically more productive than mediocre ones in just about everything they do, and typically the extra cost to hire them isn't even close to proportionate to that extra productivity.
You don't have to be making the next Google, solving difficult CS problems and racing to get first-mover advantage in your market. You just have to be making software where every bug that makes it into production is going to cost you a lot of money to fix, or where shipping sooner means bringing in revenues sooner.
Of course there are some problems that only a sufficiently skilled programmer will be able to solve at all. But even doing more routine work, a good programmer produces better quality code faster than a mediocre programmer in almost any context. Also, if you're putting together a team, having a few good programmers instead of many mediocre ones disproportionately reduces communication and management overheads.
One of the things that fascinates me about this debate -- in a sickening, slow-motion train-wreck-watching kind of way -- is how inherently biased the participants often seem to be.
For example, try rereading just the summary and comments on this page and counting how many references are specifically to US/American citizens. Does no-one who is not a US citizen deserve to be treated with respect, considered innocent until proven guilty, and protected by law against infringements of their basic rights and freedoms? Does no-one who is a US citizen ever do anything bad? Does anyone really think the passport someone carries -- basically an accident of birth -- is the most reliable indicator of future intentions?
Usually at this point someone pipes up with how the NSA is there to protect US interests, but that argument holds little water. If the NSA is undermining communication security to monitor others then it is undermining security for US citizens as well. And the same for GCHQ here in the UK, and every other state surveillance apparatus. So by the national interest argument, at best every state surveillance organisation in the world except possibly your own is a threat to your basic freedoms and every other nation in the world is acting like a hostile power in some sort of information-age Cold War.
This is clearly an absurd default position. International partnerships and friendships can be mutually beneficial in numerous ways, and we should be working together to develop those relationships for the good of everyone in our increasingly global society. And yet, the current obsession with intrusive surveillance and security theatre is threatening many of those potential benefits in all kinds of subtle ways, and the only news stories about international diplomacy in recent years seem to be about shady back-room deals that further the interests of state power and/or big business, often conveniently circumventing the normal safeguards provided by national laws in the process.
I don't think this position is sustainable, but my worry is that it will eventually fail not because we decided like civilised people that this kind of behaviour is unhealthy and unacceptable, but because it created so much of a them-and-us divide between normal people and powerful organisations like governments and big businesses that we reached a point of widespread civil disobedience or even actual civil war, causing catastrophically vast damage to society for at least a generation and out of all proportion to any threat these measures ever protected against.
Most decent companies, HR is just a first hurtle.
In any sensible company doing technical recruitment, HR (and Legal) aren't even involved until a relatively late stage in the proceedings, to ensure that the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed. Of course, there aren't that many sensible companies when it comes to technical recruitment. :-(
If you have HR as your front-line recruitment organisation, you are almost doomed to mediocrity. Very few good candidates actually change jobs by replying to that kind of ad and playing the HR skills database lottery, so you have eliminated many of the people you would most like to hire before you start.
It needs a lot more qualifiers than that.
For a start, as with an unfortunate number of academic studies, it appears that the sample population consisted of undergraduates and recent graduates. That alone completely invalidates any conclusions as they might apply to experienced professionals with better judgement about when and how to use refactoring techniques.
Even without that, there seem to be a number of fundamental concerns about the data.
One obvious example is that they consider lines of code to be a metric that tells you anything useful beyond the width you need to allow for the line number margin in your text editor. I doubt most experienced programmers would agree that a LOC count in isolation tells us anything useful about maintainability or that the mere fact that LOC went up or down after a change necessarily meant the code had become better or worse in any useful sense.
Another concern is that they talk about "analysability", but this seems to be measured only by reference to a brief examination of a small code base in one of two versions, unrefactored and refactored. I'd like to know what the actual code looked like before I read anything at all into that data -- what refactoring was performed, what was the motivation for each change, and how do they know those two small code bases were representative of either refactoring in general or the effectiveness of refactoring on larger code bases or code bases that developers have more time to study and work with?
I'm all for empirical data -- goodness knows, we need more objective information about what really works in an industry as hype-driven and accepting of poor quality as ours -- but I'm afraid this particular study seems to be so flawed that it really tells us very little of value.
It remains the case that either my original statement is true, meaning a counter-example for the reliability of fact-based ranking has been identified, or my original statement is false, in which case the statement itself becomes a counter-example because it is widely repeated but incorrect.
Of course we have. The response was deliberately paradoxical. Think about it.
Oh, the irony!
Erm... It was intended to be ironic. Well, paradoxical, technically. Compare my final sentence
Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.
with the classic "This statement is false".
If my statement were true, it would illustrate a problem with Google's proposal.
But as my statement is false, it is itself a demonstration of the problem, because it perpetuates a myth sufficiently popular that it even has its own Wikipedia page. I was a little surprised that I couldn't also find it on Snopes.
Anyway, it's disappointing that no-one seems to have noticed that. Were none of you even a little suspicious about a post that in one paragraph said "Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct" and then repeated one of the most popular myths there is? Really?
Ah, yes, an excellent follow-up, presented with great subtlety: any writing that makes its point through hyperbole, analogy, figurative imagery, or indeed any other style that isn't literally, objectively, factually, 100% correct could also suffer. Well played, fellow Slashdotter.
"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...
And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.
Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.
Now will ICANN put its foot down
It had better hope so, because giving entire TLDs to specific big companies could easily be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of the rest of the world accepting US-led administration of the general Internet. There's plenty of scepticism already, but organisations like ICANN are tolerated because frankly no-one has much of a better idea or wants to take on the responsibility. However, it is not difficult to think of a better idea than letting big businesses rewrite the established rules in arguably the most important address space in the world today for their own benefit.
Domain squatting is over. I, for one, welcome our new entire TLD squatting overlords. </sarcasm>
I tend to agree about the icons, but I do think flat design is particularly bad in this respect. By its nature, it removes tools that could otherwise be used for distinguishing different types of content, establishing hierarchy, and directing the user to important details.
The Microsoft style of flat as seen here isn't as bad as the more extreme "monochrome line art" version that is plaguing web sites at the moment. Even so, all those subtle lighting-based effects we used to see, and even the not-so-subtle styling of say Apple's older metallic or aqua looks, could serve practical purposes as well as creating a signature style for a platform.
The thing that really hit me about the screenshot was how crowded it looks. The example is presenting information with a clear underlying structure (a file system) and a small number of actions I can take, and probably half the area of that window is empty space. And yet, my immediate reaction is that there's no clear structure to tell me where to look, and the design desperately needs more visual hierarchy and better use of whitespace.
Of course, this is a recurring problem with the current trend for flat designs, bright colour schemes with limited contrast, and very rectilinear graphics and layout. It's still disappointing that Microsoft seems to be chasing Apple and Google down that blind alley, though, instead of coming up with something more interesting, distinctive, and most importantly, usable.
Here in the UK, our journalism professional doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in its ability to police itself. As you may be aware, we just had a long and very public judge-led enquiry into press behaviour, including some of the outright criminal actions that some parts of the media engaged in to get their stories. At least one newspaper collapsed as a result, and several industry heavyweights are doing jail time. So I'm not sure appealing to journalistic ethics over the law of the land is any better as a strategy for promoting the responsible use of protected speech.
To the meat of it, the only thing I can gather is that you want to somehow ensure that everyone's identity is available and verifiable on every comment.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that if you are actively claiming a certain level of protected qualification, you should actually have it.
This is quite orthogonal to the issue of anonymity, which IMHO is a much harder one simply because someone who can't be identified is self-evidently immune from prosecution but as you rightly point out anonymity has also been a positive influence on many of the most significant breakthroughs in recent history. There are clearly both genuine pros and genuine cons to anonymous speech.
It's true that if we allow anonymity then someone could claim false qualifications even if doing so is illegal. However, I think we are slowly learning as a society not to trust everything we read on the Internet when we don't know the source, and this somewhat mitigates the damage.
I challenged you to provide just one example of censorship working, and you came up empty (again).
Here are a few places where a degree of censorship might be morally justifiable -- not saying it necessarily is, but there's enough of an argument for reasonable debate:
Protection of individual privacy
Innocent until proven guilty
Operational details of genuine military/security activities
Advertising aimed at minors or other vulnerable people
Advertising prescription-only medication to non-prescribers
Political advertising by artificial legal entities (businesses etc.)
As a matter of law, various first world jurisdictions do in fact take different positions on some of these issues today.
Once again, I don't think anyone here is disputing that censorship is fundamentally a nasty and potentially very damaging idea. I think the rational debate is about whether things like spreading misinformation, infringing privacy, and taking advantage of the vulnerable are worse.
The theory of our amendments is such that if a person is accused of a crime there should be no journalism which presents an opinion of guilt until the Jury has done it's job.
That seems a reasonable principle, which is probably in the interests of justice. But how is it not a restriction on free speech? Is this not just another form of censorship? I haven't brought this situation up myself, but if I'd been pushed for more examples of free speech vs. privacy issues and why I believe privacy should be given more weight in our modern, highly connected world, this would have been one of the first examples I would have given.
Then who do you propose be the arbiter of who can comment and on what topics?
Are we back to on-line discussions again now? If so, then I haven't proposed any general limitation on who may comment, only that when doing so people shouldn't be able to claim protected qualification or authority that they do not legitimately possess.
To me, that is still a restriction on absolute freedom of speech, but a justifiable one. I see no general need to protect malicious liars from the harmful consequences of their actions under colour of defending free speech. Others here seem to feel this isn't a freedom of speech issue but more a matter of fraud, which to me just seems like quibbling over semantics, but maybe their views and mine aren't so different after all and we just frame the argument in slightly different ways. Perhaps protecting speech yet punishing its consequences is a particularly US way of looking at the issue, like framing the debate in terms of the First Amendment rather than any specific moral, ethical or practical motivation?
How do you propose that the system does not become corrupt like our allegedly free democracies?
The qualifications are awarded by peers through an open, transparent process. As I commented elsewhere, that is the best system I know of for recognising any particular qualification or authority. It's not perfect, but to defeat it you have to corrupt the entire expert body in a field, and if you can do that then the field has no value anyway.
If you claim to want control, there must be a controlling entity.
But that controlling entity doesn't have to be part of the government, any more than we have courts that make determinations of guilt or innocence based on the whim of the Powers That Be rather than people being tried by juries of their peers.
Censorship can not be implemented without corruption, and though repeatedly attempted in history it has _ONLY_ resulted in damage to society. Never has censorship been implemented in a positive way, because it can't be implemented in a positive way.
I'm not so sure. Censorship is a very dangerous thing, and if you said that free speech should only be obstructed when it is necessary to protect other fundamental principles, I'd be the first to agree.
But I don't accept your premise that anything resembling censorship is automatically a bad thing in any context. People lie, with damaging consequence. Even when they aren't lying, you can't force people to tell the whole truth, and a half-truth may be worse than saying nothing at all. You also can't give everyone the power to speak with an equal voice, but otherwise reasonable arguments about defeating negative speech by countering rationally with a more positive alternative tend to assume a right to reply exists, which of course it doesn't in practice. Unless you're going to physically compel everyone to provide such a right of reply, which you can't because it's completely impractical, you have only traded one form of censorship for another anyway.
Consider those things in the context of, say, modern political systems, and you can immediately explain much of the corruption we see in the world today. Consider them in the context of a specialised profession like medicine, and you can immediately explain a lot of problems in the US healthcare industry.
Same thing with libel and slander - it is the fraud that is being punished, not the speech.
That may be true as a technicality, depending on how your local laws are written, but what difference does it make in practice? Either you are free to say something defamatory about someone else or you are not. If you will be punished for saying something fraudulent, you are still not free to say that thing without legal consequence.
That is why there is more freedom for people in the United States than other countries like France or Germany.
An interesting example. In Europe, we tend to favour individual privacy over free speech to a greater degree than the US does, perhaps because in Europe -- and particularly in countries such as those you mentioned -- we still have living memory of what can happen if privacy is not sufficiently protected.
Unfortunately, requiring certification — as seems to be your proposal — will continue to allow those same politicians to control, just who is free to call themselves a "subject matter expert".
Why? The politicians don't award higher degrees and professional qualifications. Generally, within regulated industries, these matters are adjudicated by more experienced peers. In the absence of any absolute truth, I don't know of any better way to run such a system than open peer review.
Sure, in principle you could undermine that system and corrupt the whole thing, but to do that you'd have to undermine the entire community to the extent that established participants almost unanimously agreed with your distorted vision rather than their own previous convictions. If you can do that in a profession important enough to regulate in the first place then you have much, much bigger things to worry about.
No-one exists in a vacuum. At some point you have to trust that someone working in a complicated field who has been recognised as competent by their peers through an open process actually does know what they're doing. The damage from political meddling happens when things like the "by their peers" and "open process" parts get forgotten.
Calling me names doesn't negate my arguments or make yours any stronger.
On your first point, while yelling "Everyone kill that guy" might not make everyone kill that guy, offering a substantial reward for doing so might. This is why crimes based on incitement and conspiracy exist.
On your second point, I don't see what alternative hypotheses about a particular scientific theory have to do with unqualified subjective opinions expressed in on-line comments. No-one is suggesting that scientists can't propose alternative theories about how the universe works, or for that matter that censorship is generally a good thing, so I don't know why you keep responding as if they are.