I don't complain about dupes, but this is ridiculous. I have to wonder if this is a sick joke. A third time? I don't even pay and I feel like demanding my money back...
Try demanding my money back. With any luck, three of us will be able to do it before they notice.
I also attribute its failure partially to some of the public thinking the coin was "collectible" and thus hoarding rather than spending them
The main cause of failure was that they coin was poorly designed (too much like a quarter) and adoption wasn't much encouraged. I lived in Australia for a while, and feel that the $1/$2 coin approach is much superior to the $1 note. US $1 notes seem as silly to me as replacing the quarter with a $0.25 note.
I've met some plenty of people with CS degrees who couldn't code.
The could talk OS theory, and tell me about OO compiler design, but they still couldn't code.
Amen, brother. When I suspect somebody is puffing, one of my favorite interview questions is, "Here's a pencil and paper. Write 'Hello World' in all the languages you've listed on your resume." It's really fun to watch the poseurs sweat. So fun I'm a little ashamed of myself, really.
No. It's everybody's loss. These losers devalue the degree of Computer Science. Employers are starting to realize that a lot of these dolts don't really have any clue at all, and this alters their perceptions of CS graduates in general. I put in the long hours and hard work to really earn my degree, but many do not. Employers are not blind -- they realize that a lot of CS "grads" are total nitwits. This might lead them to believe that I am as well.
Speaking as a person who's just sorting through a stack of resumes, you're absolutely right. Generally I don't bother with people who lack a track record of actually delivering and maintaining software. Schools produce too many idiots whose main skill is getting grades. I run tight ships, and can't afford to spend massive amount of time educating somebody on the difference between academics and industry.
Want to catch my attention even if you're fresh out of school? Include something prominent on the resume that shows you can perform. Running an open-source project or building a dynamic web site with an obvious user base are great examples.
Why does everyone here think that computer science is a field of study so noble, so exalted, that it and only it should escape the mediocre masses that muddle along in any other field?
Because once you look at the productivity of people who do it because they like it, it's pretty obvious that the clock-punchers are not worth hiring. Seriously, I've been interviewing potential hires the last couple of weeks, and the people who love it are obvious to me. I might have to pay 20% more, but they'll be at least twice as productive. And now that I think back, some of the clock-punchers I have worked with are negatively productive: every time they check in they reduce the value of the code base by introducing bugs and increasing maintenance costs.
Which is a lesson that technical departments at times should heed: don't waste resources on making stuff better than it needs to be; nobody's going to notice, or thank you, and you ended up wasting resources better spent somewhere else.
The important difference in that assignments last a few weeks; in rare cases, an entire semester. With code, if your project succeeds the code could be around for decades.
You shouldn't waste money on excess features or library functionality that you might need someday. But money is never wasted on doing software right.
However, the load on the servers remains the same in both cases, so it's not clear to me why content providers would care either way. According to the linked article, they're the ones asking for this feature.
Because content providers care about the user experience. I have seen places put a lot of money into implementing a 1-in-N version of server-side click tracking because they want to get their stats without slowing down the user experience. Happy users means more return visits and therefore more money.
I have a hard time understanding why the server-side implementation is so much slower than this new "ping" attribute.
Because the ping approach should be asynchronous, whereas the server-side URL chaining has to be one URL after another. On average, the server-side implementation will be a little better than twice as slow.
If clients can turn it off, I suspect that web sites won't trust it. This is something that is most accurately done on the server, and I think that's where it will stay.
Consider how they do it currently. A few do it exclusively server-side, but many turn it on only every Nth page view, some use Javascript, and some just don't do it. Why? Because the server-side solutions degrade the user experience. Clients can already turn off the Javascript or hack around the URL redirectors, so there's no reason to think this will be much less accurate. Browser adoption is a bigger deal.
So, I don't mean to go all "Senstionalist Title" on your ass[...]
Indeed. And how about the body copy, with its use of scare quotes and scare words like "unlimited and uncontrollable"? People, this isn't an HTML tag that will steal your precious bodily fluids. It's basically the mirror image of the HTTP Referer header.
If somebody has access to the web server logs of the servers concerned, they can (and do) already sift out this information. Ditto if Javascript is enabled and you don't look very carefully at the status-bar URL display before clicking. By getting people to standardize on a tag, this will make it easier for you turn it off, not harder. Chill.
Why should site developers use the ping attribute to track users, if there are solutions already that the user can't disable. The ping attribute will simply never catch on and there's not a bit of control users will gain.
Because it will be faster, easier to implement, a better user experience, and even if the tinfoil-hat crowd disables it, it probably won't matter much to the accuracy of the stats.
The much bigger barrier to adoption is the lack of wide browser adoption.
Once users start blocking ping URLs, as they inevitably will, this transparency means that click stats will be very unreliable.
A very small portion of people (including apparently a number of needlessly alarmed people on Slashdot) will bother to turn this off. The vast majority of humanity will continue not to care. This will add a small amount of unreliability to click stats, but that unreliability will be swamped by the normal apparent unreliability of the web caused by different configurations, different browsers, different OSes, different platforms, a wide variety of proxies, and cats chewing on ethernet cables.
The kinds of people who use these stats seriously already know that they are statistics, not crime scene records.
Do I hear a subliminal tone of anti-anonymity? The important thing with anonymity is to expect and tolerate the trolls, not to condemn anonymity for it. One day you will be glad you stuck through the trolls when you really have something to say, but can't do it freely anymore.
I'm not anti-anonymity at all. I am anti-asshole, though.
I don't think workable anonymity necessarily requires putting up with 0.1% signal and 99.9% noise. Slashdot is a good example of a system that allows anonymity of various sorts but still is reasonably functional. But I note that even Slashdot bans Tor nodes from posting. People who advocate various sorts of identity-hiding should learn a lesson from that. They might also learn a lesson from the way spammers have forced pretty much everybody to install a wide variety of technologies to drastically limit anonymous speech.
OTOH, if you never have anything important to say.. well, you might as well be anti-anonymity.
/me rolls his eyes.
And in answer to your next question, I have indeed stopped beating my wife lately. Thanks for asking.
We're going to censure MS for abiding by Chinese law, while simultaneously maintaining MFN status with them?
For the record, I am fully behind denying Microsoft status as a Most Favored Nation.
Re:Perl 6 is evolving the language into awesome!
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
And wasn't that well thought out. Who needs "+" for concat like most other scripting languages when you can use a "." instead. Doh.
Sorry, but which other scripting languages were using a + in 1987?
Re:No language that I like better
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ignore the analogies, OOP has nothing to do with obkects at its core. OOP is basicly encapsulation and interfaces.
A reasonable theory, but you're missing half of the power of object-oriented languages. Read Evans' fantastic book Domain-Driven Design for the other half. You will discover than a lot of people, even many of those writing "Intro to Java" books, made the transition to OO languages without ever learning OO design.
And I'm guessing that's a reflection of what your site is. Those who are going through the measure to use tor to anonymize their browsing aren't surfing casually, they're going to the sites they NEED to go to for their work. If that's not you...
Seriously, what percentage of Internet traffic do you thing people NEED to go to for their work? And what further fraction receive only that kind of traffic?
I turn up at Slashdot because it's a good place to keep up on industry trends. I imagine a lot of others use it for work, too. But pretty much any site that allows community participation will have problems with jerks, and those jerks will abuse anonymity tools so that they can abuse the community sites.
Anonym.OS: the OS of choice for privacy geeks and serious assholes.
<ironic>If only we could implement some compulsory registration for Tor, everything would be fine!</ironic>
To my mind, that's the problem that all of these anonymous computing efforts fail to solve: a lot of people use anonymity to be jerks. When I look at the traffic my sites get from open proxies, a vanishingly small percentage is from political dissidents; most of it is from turd-in-the-punchbowl fuckheads.
It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop - but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
That's an excellent point. They seem to miss that of the four Internet giants (eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo), two of them were created by students and two by small entrepreneurs, one of whom was just trying to help his wife sell her Beanie Babies. None of them were large government-sponsored projects.
Of course, the Internet itself was government-sponsored, but not in this let's-create-a-juggernaut kind of way. It was built mainly by people trying to get things done. I hope the people behind this EU project haven't forgotten the lesson of the OSI, a vast bureaucracy-driven attempt to create an internetworking protocol suite, one that was utterly crushed by TCP/IP.
When learning about certain code bases, I find it extremely valuable to start with whatever beginning code there is because it illustrates the core concepts while not being a thicket of code. It also helps to see what design decisions were made and then rescinded.
Agreed! Being able to get an annotated view helps me a lot when I'm coming to grips with a code base. It doesn't matter if the old versions build; the history is very valuable in its own right.
Eclipse is not bad - IDEA is expensive, and Eclipse is a decent free alternative. But if you have the money, there's no reason not to use IDEA. Eclipse has always seemed to me like a poorly-executed IDEA clone. Similar to most open-source desktop software, really.
I'd agree. I have used both extensively, and IDEA has always had a much better UI. For something that I spend many hours a day using, that's very important to me. It's sort of like the difference between the iPod and Brand X MP3 player. It's not that there's anything very wrong with most of the MP3 players, but there's something so right about the iPod.
Note that they also regularly offer half-price personal licenses for people just doing their own thing.
Eclipse has always seemed to me like a poorly-executed IDEA clone. Similar to most open-source desktop software, really.
Yep! Another fellow opines that Eclipse is Bizarro IDEA.
IDEA has a 30-day free trial - why don't you download it and give it a spin?
I second that. Make sure you really use it for something serious, too, and take the time to learn some of the handy keystrokes and the more common refactorings. Ones I use at least hourly:
Ctrl-Q: show definition (and docs, if any) of symbol under the cursor
Ctrl-B: jump to definition of symbol under the cursor
Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow: back to previous location (like back in your browser, it has a stack of visited edit locations)
Ctrl-N: find class by name
Ctrl-Shift-N: find non-Java file by name
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N: find any method by name
Ctrl-Alt-V: extract highlighted expression as variable
Ctrl-Alt-N: Inline highlighted variable or method
Ctrl-Alt-M: extract highlighted block as method
Ctrl-F6: global symbol rename (does it via the parse tree, so variables or methods with the same name in different contexts won't be touched; if you rename a class or package, it takes care of all filenames and related import statements)
Ctrl-Shift-F6: change method signature (again, global based on the parse tree)
If you're just a casual Java developer or find the price a big deal, then Eclipse is perfectly adequate. For me, though, it's very much worth the money.
So in a way, philosophy is what religion aims to be in its purest & truest form.
I disagree. Philosophy may provide you with the intellectual structure, but for most people religion is about more than that: they want a community of spiritual practice, or at least spiritual practices. The Philosopher's Song is undeniably fun, but it's very far from a hymn. And maybe your philosophy classes were more lively than mine, but I just don't see most philosophy books giving how-to info on meditative techniques, or ecstatic dance, or peyote rituals.
I know plenty of people who are functional atheists (some of them actual; some of them deists; some of them "are, like, totally into the universe, man") that even though they aren't religious still seek out some of the things we commonly associate with religion. I think that's because they fill real human needs for some people in a way that philosophy never will.
Re:whats so bad about being addicted to games?
on
Getting Off NetHack?
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· Score: 1
at least she's not out there doing drugs, right? [...] whats so wrong with letting her do something that gives her pleasure?
What makes you think it actually gives her pleasure? For many addicts, what they actually get, whether they admit it or not, is a way to hide from their problems. That can be fine in moderation, but I think one of the signs of a serious addition is that it makes the problems worse. Go take a look at the gambling addicts in any casino, or the obvious alcoholics in the bar. Does it look so much like they're having fun?
And that vicious circle the reason to intervene. If somebody is screwing up their life, it doesn't matter that being an alcoholic is so much better than being a crackhead, or being addicted to a game is better than being an alcoholic.
Uh, yes it does actually. Learning how something works inevitably takes the magic out of it.
Maybe you're not learning enough. The latest thing to catch my interest is plants and plant biology. Everything I read makes it more amazing. So complicated! So intricate! Flowers, for example, are so much more than a pretty face. And the continual slow-motion warfare that goes on among plants is amazing.
The only drawback so far is that now that I think of flowers as plant sexual organs, my girlfriend's flower calendar looks disurbingly like porn money shots. I'm glad that for 2006 she replaced it with a Hello Kitty calendar.
I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
It depends on the gods we're talking about.
Thor and Neptune are no longer particularly persuasive to modern minds. We know what thunder is, and although the ocean can be mysterious, we no longer personify that. But I have plenty of Christian friends who see their God as having started it all going for his own inscrutable purposes, one of which happens to be us.
For them, it's one of the fundamental axioms of their worldview, and it's rooted in direct personal experience rather than evidence: they feel what they interpret as the presence of God. Personally I explain things differently, but I don't have any particular need to force my explanations on them.
The truth is that we don't know why the universe is, and maybe we never will. That somebody did it is a reasonable hypothesis, and one that need not conflict with any observed evidence. If that's what it takes for some people to appreciate the world and spend time each week figuring out how to be better people, I'm willing to cut them a little slack.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't complain about dupes, but this is ridiculous. I have to wonder if this is a sick joke. A third time? I don't even pay and I feel like demanding my money back...
Try demanding my money back. With any luck, three of us will be able to do it before they notice.
I also attribute its failure partially to some of the public thinking the coin was "collectible" and thus hoarding rather than spending them
The main cause of failure was that they coin was poorly designed (too much like a quarter) and adoption wasn't much encouraged. I lived in Australia for a while, and feel that the $1/$2 coin approach is much superior to the $1 note. US $1 notes seem as silly to me as replacing the quarter with a $0.25 note.
I've met some plenty of people with CS degrees who couldn't code.
The could talk OS theory, and tell me about OO compiler design, but they still couldn't code.
Amen, brother. When I suspect somebody is puffing, one of my favorite interview questions is, "Here's a pencil and paper. Write 'Hello World' in all the languages you've listed on your resume." It's really fun to watch the poseurs sweat. So fun I'm a little ashamed of myself, really.
No. It's everybody's loss. These losers devalue the degree of Computer Science. Employers are starting to realize that a lot of these dolts don't really have any clue at all, and this alters their perceptions of CS graduates in general. I put in the long hours and hard work to really earn my degree, but many do not. Employers are not blind -- they realize that a lot of CS "grads" are total nitwits. This might lead them to believe that I am as well.
Speaking as a person who's just sorting through a stack of resumes, you're absolutely right. Generally I don't bother with people who lack a track record of actually delivering and maintaining software. Schools produce too many idiots whose main skill is getting grades. I run tight ships, and can't afford to spend massive amount of time educating somebody on the difference between academics and industry.
Want to catch my attention even if you're fresh out of school? Include something prominent on the resume that shows you can perform. Running an open-source project or building a dynamic web site with an obvious user base are great examples.
Why does everyone here think that computer science is a field of study so noble, so exalted, that it and only it should escape the mediocre masses that muddle along in any other field?
Because once you look at the productivity of people who do it because they like it, it's pretty obvious that the clock-punchers are not worth hiring. Seriously, I've been interviewing potential hires the last couple of weeks, and the people who love it are obvious to me. I might have to pay 20% more, but they'll be at least twice as productive. And now that I think back, some of the clock-punchers I have worked with are negatively productive: every time they check in they reduce the value of the code base by introducing bugs and increasing maintenance costs.
Which is a lesson that technical departments at times should heed: don't waste resources on making stuff better than it needs to be; nobody's going to notice, or thank you, and you ended up wasting resources better spent somewhere else.
The important difference in that assignments last a few weeks; in rare cases, an entire semester. With code, if your project succeeds the code could be around for decades.
You shouldn't waste money on excess features or library functionality that you might need someday. But money is never wasted on doing software right.
However, the load on the servers remains the same in both cases, so it's not clear to me why content providers would care either way. According to the linked article, they're the ones asking for this feature.
Because content providers care about the user experience. I have seen places put a lot of money into implementing a 1-in-N version of server-side click tracking because they want to get their stats without slowing down the user experience. Happy users means more return visits and therefore more money.
I have a hard time understanding why the server-side implementation is so much slower than this new "ping" attribute.
Because the ping approach should be asynchronous, whereas the server-side URL chaining has to be one URL after another. On average, the server-side implementation will be a little better than twice as slow.
If clients can turn it off, I suspect that web sites won't trust it. This is something that is most accurately done on the server, and I think that's where it will stay.
Consider how they do it currently. A few do it exclusively server-side, but many turn it on only every Nth page view, some use Javascript, and some just don't do it. Why? Because the server-side solutions degrade the user experience. Clients can already turn off the Javascript or hack around the URL redirectors, so there's no reason to think this will be much less accurate. Browser adoption is a bigger deal.
So, I don't mean to go all "Senstionalist Title" on your ass[...]
Indeed. And how about the body copy, with its use of scare quotes and scare words like "unlimited and uncontrollable"? People, this isn't an HTML tag that will steal your precious bodily fluids. It's basically the mirror image of the HTTP Referer header.
If somebody has access to the web server logs of the servers concerned, they can (and do) already sift out this information. Ditto if Javascript is enabled and you don't look very carefully at the status-bar URL display before clicking. By getting people to standardize on a tag, this will make it easier for you turn it off, not harder. Chill.
Why should site developers use the ping attribute to track users, if there are solutions already that the user can't disable. The ping attribute will simply never catch on and there's not a bit of control users will gain.
Because it will be faster, easier to implement, a better user experience, and even if the tinfoil-hat crowd disables it, it probably won't matter much to the accuracy of the stats.
The much bigger barrier to adoption is the lack of wide browser adoption.
Once users start blocking ping URLs, as they inevitably will, this transparency means that click stats will be very unreliable.
A very small portion of people (including apparently a number of needlessly alarmed people on Slashdot) will bother to turn this off. The vast majority of humanity will continue not to care. This will add a small amount of unreliability to click stats, but that unreliability will be swamped by the normal apparent unreliability of the web caused by different configurations, different browsers, different OSes, different platforms, a wide variety of proxies, and cats chewing on ethernet cables.
The kinds of people who use these stats seriously already know that they are statistics, not crime scene records.
Do I hear a subliminal tone of anti-anonymity? The important thing with anonymity is to expect and tolerate the trolls, not to condemn anonymity for it. One day you will be glad you stuck through the trolls when you really have something to say, but can't do it freely anymore.
/me rolls his eyes.
I'm not anti-anonymity at all. I am anti-asshole, though.
I don't think workable anonymity necessarily requires putting up with 0.1% signal and 99.9% noise. Slashdot is a good example of a system that allows anonymity of various sorts but still is reasonably functional. But I note that even Slashdot bans Tor nodes from posting. People who advocate various sorts of identity-hiding should learn a lesson from that. They might also learn a lesson from the way spammers have forced pretty much everybody to install a wide variety of technologies to drastically limit anonymous speech.
OTOH, if you never have anything important to say.. well, you might as well be anti-anonymity.
And in answer to your next question, I have indeed stopped beating my wife lately. Thanks for asking.
We're going to censure MS for abiding by Chinese law, while simultaneously maintaining MFN status with them?
For the record, I am fully behind denying Microsoft status as a Most Favored Nation.
And wasn't that well thought out. Who needs "+" for concat like most other scripting languages when you can use a "." instead. Doh.
Sorry, but which other scripting languages were using a + in 1987?
Ignore the analogies, OOP has nothing to do with obkects at its core. OOP is basicly encapsulation and interfaces.
A reasonable theory, but you're missing half of the power of object-oriented languages. Read Evans' fantastic book Domain-Driven Design for the other half. You will discover than a lot of people, even many of those writing "Intro to Java" books, made the transition to OO languages without ever learning OO design.
And I'm guessing that's a reflection of what your site is. Those who are going through the measure to use tor to anonymize their browsing aren't surfing casually, they're going to the sites they NEED to go to for their work. If that's not you...
Seriously, what percentage of Internet traffic do you thing people NEED to go to for their work? And what further fraction receive only that kind of traffic?
I turn up at Slashdot because it's a good place to keep up on industry trends. I imagine a lot of others use it for work, too. But pretty much any site that allows community participation will have problems with jerks, and those jerks will abuse anonymity tools so that they can abuse the community sites.
That's because people use Tor to troll Slashdot.
Anonym.OS: the OS of choice for privacy geeks and serious assholes.
<ironic>If only we could implement some compulsory registration for Tor, everything would be fine!</ironic>
To my mind, that's the problem that all of these anonymous computing efforts fail to solve: a lot of people use anonymity to be jerks. When I look at the traffic my sites get from open proxies, a vanishingly small percentage is from political dissidents; most of it is from turd-in-the-punchbowl fuckheads.
It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop - but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
That's an excellent point. They seem to miss that of the four Internet giants (eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo), two of them were created by students and two by small entrepreneurs, one of whom was just trying to help his wife sell her Beanie Babies. None of them were large government-sponsored projects.
Of course, the Internet itself was government-sponsored, but not in this let's-create-a-juggernaut kind of way. It was built mainly by people trying to get things done. I hope the people behind this EU project haven't forgotten the lesson of the OSI, a vast bureaucracy-driven attempt to create an internetworking protocol suite, one that was utterly crushed by TCP/IP.
When learning about certain code bases, I find it extremely valuable to start with whatever beginning code there is because it illustrates the core concepts while not being a thicket of code. It also helps to see what design decisions were made and then rescinded.
Agreed! Being able to get an annotated view helps me a lot when I'm coming to grips with a code base. It doesn't matter if the old versions build; the history is very valuable in its own right.
I'd agree. I have used both extensively, and IDEA has always had a much better UI. For something that I spend many hours a day using, that's very important to me. It's sort of like the difference between the iPod and Brand X MP3 player. It's not that there's anything very wrong with most of the MP3 players, but there's something so right about the iPod.
Note that they also regularly offer half-price personal licenses for people just doing their own thing.
Eclipse has always seemed to me like a poorly-executed IDEA clone. Similar to most open-source desktop software, really.
Yep! Another fellow opines that Eclipse is Bizarro IDEA.
IDEA has a 30-day free trial - why don't you download it and give it a spin?
I second that. Make sure you really use it for something serious, too, and take the time to learn some of the handy keystrokes and the more common refactorings. Ones I use at least hourly:
If you're just a casual Java developer or find the price a big deal, then Eclipse is perfectly adequate. For me, though, it's very much worth the money.
So in a way, philosophy is what religion aims to be in its purest & truest form.
I disagree. Philosophy may provide you with the intellectual structure, but for most people religion is about more than that: they want a community of spiritual practice, or at least spiritual practices. The Philosopher's Song is undeniably fun, but it's very far from a hymn. And maybe your philosophy classes were more lively than mine, but I just don't see most philosophy books giving how-to info on meditative techniques, or ecstatic dance, or peyote rituals.
I know plenty of people who are functional atheists (some of them actual; some of them deists; some of them "are, like, totally into the universe, man") that even though they aren't religious still seek out some of the things we commonly associate with religion. I think that's because they fill real human needs for some people in a way that philosophy never will.
For more info on this, Huston Smith is a great author to check out. I'd recommend The World's Religions and Cleansing the Doors of Perception.
at least she's not out there doing drugs, right? [...]
whats so wrong with letting her do something that gives her pleasure?
What makes you think it actually gives her pleasure? For many addicts, what they actually get, whether they admit it or not, is a way to hide from their problems. That can be fine in moderation, but I think one of the signs of a serious addition is that it makes the problems worse. Go take a look at the gambling addicts in any casino, or the obvious alcoholics in the bar. Does it look so much like they're having fun?
And that vicious circle the reason to intervene. If somebody is screwing up their life, it doesn't matter that being an alcoholic is so much better than being a crackhead, or being addicted to a game is better than being an alcoholic.
Uh, yes it does actually. Learning how something works inevitably takes the magic out of it.
Maybe you're not learning enough. The latest thing to catch my interest is plants and plant biology. Everything I read makes it more amazing. So complicated! So intricate! Flowers, for example, are so much more than a pretty face. And the continual slow-motion warfare that goes on among plants is amazing.
The only drawback so far is that now that I think of flowers as plant sexual organs, my girlfriend's flower calendar looks disurbingly like porn money shots. I'm glad that for 2006 she replaced it with a Hello Kitty calendar.
I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
It depends on the gods we're talking about.
Thor and Neptune are no longer particularly persuasive to modern minds. We know what thunder is, and although the ocean can be mysterious, we no longer personify that. But I have plenty of Christian friends who see their God as having started it all going for his own inscrutable purposes, one of which happens to be us.
For them, it's one of the fundamental axioms of their worldview, and it's rooted in direct personal experience rather than evidence: they feel what they interpret as the presence of God. Personally I explain things differently, but I don't have any particular need to force my explanations on them.
The truth is that we don't know why the universe is, and maybe we never will. That somebody did it is a reasonable hypothesis, and one that need not conflict with any observed evidence. If that's what it takes for some people to appreciate the world and spend time each week figuring out how to be better people, I'm willing to cut them a little slack.