Why is it foolish? The risk is low for the kickstarter investor -- he/she won't lose more than a few hundred dollars. The question here is how much percentage of the company is each investor owed for supporting the company and risking his hard-earned money?
Each time a startup borrows money from somebody, whether they are VCs, angel investors, banks, etc., they have to sign over ownership of a small share of the company to the investor. Why is that not happening here? Because they are small, gullible people?
1). So people donated $2.5 million to start up a company that sold for $2 billion, and they don't see a dime of that.
Yes, dumb people get robbed. They are partially responsible for OR's (whopping) success, but won't see a dime. They should have done it the way venture capitalists do, and obtained a share of 10 or 20% of the company in exchange for the $2.5 mill.
Going forward, is the govt going to regulate how much percentage profit from a company's sale is passed onto the kickstarter investors?
When parents do their kids' homework, the kids lose the opportunity to learn the material for themselves.
TFA isn't about parents doing children's homework, but rather about discouraging them to help their children complete it. There's a big difference. Suppose a kid who barely understands whole numbers and addition comes across a homework problem he has very little understanding: -2 + 5 = ? Who's going to help him?
You're right, they both kinda suck UI wise and they carry over their 70s design decisions 40 years later. But in vim's defense, if you have a lot of commands to execute in command mode, there's very little finger effort (i.e. typing) required to execute a series of editing commands (dd, yy, p, etc). Doing the same in your typical IDE would require you to constantly hold down the ctrl, command, alt and/or shift keys while executing a command modelessly. This causes finger strain over time, not to mention it is slow. I don't think any other editor gives you cruise control like vim in command mode.
To be fair to Facebook, no other languages had those advantages in 2002-2003. Assuming you didn't want to use F/CGI, plugins for Apache or the equivalent, your server-side scripting options were JSP, Asp.NET and PHP.
Wow, they couldn't port a simple web app into a mature language in 10 years. You have to wonder what kind of programmers they hire.
Isn't the developer in this case more like the builder/engineer who takes an architect's vision and merely implements it?
Close, but no cigar. While I'm no civil engineer, most buildings are not all that different, other than the appearance (UI). So if you have tens of thousands of homes/buildings in a city, the engineer/architect solve roughly the same set of problems in designing all those buildings. Those tens of thousands of buildings can be reduced to a few dozen types of buildings (here, a type is similar to a C++ class). So the job of creating a new building in the city would be to mainly tweak a previously designed template to obtain the final blueprint.
In summary, the building construction often requires solving the same set of problems over and over again -- a job of skill but not much creativity/invention. That's not true of software... if enough people need a problem solved it will be implemented in just a handful of libraries and not repeated thousands of times like in construction.
In a software analogy to construction, a software developer designs and builds an automated or a semi-automated robot that can construct a certain type of building. If the owner of this robot paid just the usual fixed salary that engineers are paid, the owner would profit tremendously and unfairly. For eg., It costs the robot owner 50 man years to build the robot. But once it's built, it only takes 3 man years to maintain it or build a new one. Now the robot owner charges 15% less per building than human builders and captures 50% of the market. It's a big win for the employer (robot owner whose profits multiple times more than human builders) and his customers (cheaper building). The robot owner is going to make tens of thousands of times more money than his R&D cost for the coming decades. The civil engineers and architects will continue to make money by repeatedly creating new variations of their building templates. However, the software home construction guys will soon be out of a job unless they can improve the robot some more because the compensation structure sucks -- it doesn't pay for repeating the same task over and over again like most other professions.
In summary, the engineers should get paid a royalty for every building built by their robot. Most employees get paid to repeat the same task over and over -- barbers, bus drivers, musicians playing the same set of songs, cooks, shopkeepers etc. The creative people like software devs, authors, music composers, painters, movie makers, food recipe makers etc. can't repeat the exact same thing over and over again. This class of workers should be compensated by royalty, not fixed salary.
Please clarify the spec further: If the list contains an int and a float (such as average([10, 12.0])), should the result be returning a float or raising a ValueError?
No need to care about mixed types. But if you want to be that specific: a) if all elements are ints, result should be an int b) if any element is a float, result should be a float c) if any element is complex, result should be complex. Rule (c) has higher priority over (b), which has higher priority over (a).
Until now you have left "the rules of integer division" unspecified. Floor division in Python 2.2+ rounds toward negative infinity, but C integer division rounds toward 0. So you've added to the spec.
I don't care what method you use, but the result should match whatever is the output a function implemented in C/C++, Java, C# function/method that averages an "int array." For eg:
public static int average(int[] arr) { int sum=0; for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) { sum += arr[i]; } return sum / arr.length; }
Implementing this function in C/C++, C# is very similar. Your function's result should match the result of the Java average() method shown above.
If I start a small corner store business making widgets, then hire you to help. I instruct you have to make my widgets, give you the tools and material to do it, pay you as we agreed, then you steal my inventory and give/sell it to someone then you are a THIEF.
Everything you say is true when we're talking about general production of physical widgets -- the raw material and production equipment belong to you and your employee performs simple repetitive, non-creative actions to build the widget for you. But does that analogy also apply to intellectual property, like software? In this case, the employer pays for a chair, a desk, electricity, cube/office, and a computer with software. None of these items are terribly expensive and are one-time investments. A developer can easily purchase them himself.
The employer then essentially provides a spec (which is often just a extremely vague set of requirements) and a monthly salary. We can therefore say that most of the software is created by the creative talent and skill (the raw material and machines in your analogy) of the developers. Does the work created by the software dev still completely belong to the employer for a few thousand dollars because of a few words written in the employment contract? I think not! Most of software is written by developers with little contribution from the employer and therefore should be licensed to the employer the same way a song is licensed by the musicians to record labels, how writers license their books to publishers etc.
If it's nonsense, why bother with trademark and look&feel (trade dress) protection laws? Is the govt. out to extract money senselessly but provide no benefit? The truth is consumers who are not heavy users of a product/service are very likely to be confused and would think the SparkFun is a Fluke. That's my opinion and you're entitled to yours.
you're confused, if there is no attempt to deceive,
Are you sure? Other than the brand name, the rest of the DMM looks like a Fluke. Potential customers who have been exposed to a Fluke dmm at university or work might confuse them for a Fluke, if only subconsciously. Plus, it is sheer laziness or theft to outright copy the entire external design of a competitor's product.
Or in Python 3.4 or later: from statistics import mean as average
I don't have 3.4, but it would be better if you could implement average using just the sum() function just so you can experience the split personality of the division operators in python 3.
I'm not clear what average([-10, -11]) should return under your specification.
As mentioned in the spec, int list should return an int. There's no confusion and no rationals because most computer programs either deal with integers or floating point numbers (rationals are extremely rare). So your function should return func([-10,-11]) --> (-10-11)/2 = -11 under the rules of integer division.
Re:The use case for a variable result type
on
Python 3.4 Released
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· Score: 1
In what specific "general library function" would "use floor division if neither b nor c is a float; otherwise, use true division" be helpful? It would prove easier for me to see your point if you can give a concrete example.
Let's take this example: Write a function that computes the average of a list (or sequence, generally speaking) of numbers. The list may contain elements that are all either integers, floats or complex numbers. The result should have the same type as an individual element of the list. So int list should return int average; float list -> float average; complex list -> complex average.
And here's the Python 2 implementation:
def average(seq): return sum(seq) / len(seq)
>>> average([10,20,30]) # int list returns int avg 20
>>> average([1+2j, 5+7j]) # complex list returns complex avg (3+4.5j)
If you try running the same code in Python 3 with an integer list, you naturally get a float result.
# python 3 average([10, 20, 30]) # error: int list returns float avg 20.0
Can you implement a simple average() function in Python 3 that satisfies the specifications mentioned above? You could, but it won't be as simple or elegant as the Python 2 version.
I gotta agree. The thing looks *exactly* like a Fluke multimeter. Exact same color, exact same appearance. Typical Chinese knockoff--I'm amazed they thought they could get away with it.
Same appearance, but prices are very different. Fluke DMMs cost $100-$150 while sparkfun DMMs cost $10-$15. That could be the reason Fluke wants them destroyed -- it will eat into their profit margin.
By determining what type you want in the result and choosing the operator that produces that type.
But that's the point, sometimes the programmer implementing "a = b div c" does not know whether the result "a" is int or float because he's writing a general library function where depending on the application "a" may be int or it be float. In python 2, he does not have to know and write "a = b / c". But that won't work in Python 3 without a lot of ugly type checking.
From reading the PEP for the "// operator" the justification for the existence of this operator is some numeric python dev was having a problem where his library users were passing ints or floats as arguments and he wanted the result of his algorithm to be a float (i.e., using ints in his algorithm were causing problems with division). And instead of just doing some smart conversion of input arguments, they decided to screw up the existing "/" operator and a new "//" divide operator.
When are they planning to connect face identification with the street/store surveillance cameras? Then they could know who is where anytime of the day unless you wear big hats, large sunglasses, fake beards etc.
# You have to use "/" for floating-pt division for the right answer: >>> 2.5 / 5.0 0.5
With python 2, it doesn't matter if the numerator and denominator is int or float, it automatically returns the correct answer all the time -- division operator is polymorphic. With python 3, if operands are integers, you must use "//" for division. If operands are floating-pt, you must use "/" for division. This is retarded because sometimes the programmer can't know what types of a, b and c are in the expression "a = b divide c." If a, b and c can be int or float, how can a programmer implement "a = b divide c" without a lot of ugly type checking? Another poor design in Python 3.
The Netscape folks did license the use of the "Java" brand name from Sun:
The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.
Maybe the author gets "value" (quoted because you're trying to ascribe a dollar amount to an intangible) from creating.
Financially speaking, the author would derive better value from flipping burgers if all he got from his book was a momentary emotion of "having created something awesome."
If an author is purely doing it for the money then that denigrates the act of creation and makes them a production line worker.
Really? In that case, software devs should work for free as there is a lot of creativity (but not as much as an author) involved in creating software.
Then neither is sitting in a mostly empty movie theater without paying for a ticket, or taking a bus or train ride, when they are mostly empty, without paying for the ticket. In both cases, the owners of those establishments are not losing any money by your freeloading because hardly anyone is using them at that moment.
Kudos to the Hungarian lawmakers... wish other countries would follow suit. As for google maps, they should get an exception from the govt. and later remove people from photos using software. It may cost extra time and money, but it's possible and worth it.
It's Google's fault. Once the $1.50 has been charged, there should be a button (called, say "Stop Credit Card Transactions") the parent can tap to prevent future credit card purchases without reentering the password.
How tough would it be to have a setting that EACH in-app purchase needs a password, OR in-app purchases are unlocked for X minutes?
Neither of these options are good. The first one is cumbersome and not user friendly. The second one leads to the children's unauthorized purchases.
almost all programmers i know who really add value to projects learned the stuff mostly on their own...teachers don't teach this stuff, the computer does. for the first six months almost everyone who is trying to write a program is going to be pounding their head on the desk.
only through that struggle will you begin to grok it.
Exactly, you can't become a samurai sword wielding ninja by vegging out in front of a flash video showing ninjas fighting and an instructor explaining tricks and theory. You've also got to pick up a wooden stick and fight.
Nevertheless, $100k is a lot of money. Would the passengers have been willing to pay more for the tickets so that their loved ones would have a slightly better idea where they crashed? Probably not.
No, $100k is not a lot of money. Consider just the fuel cost: 10 hours flying time by a Boeing 747 consumes 36,000 gallons of fuel. That's around $100k or more.
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Why is it foolish? The risk is low for the kickstarter investor -- he/she won't lose more than a few hundred dollars. The question here is how much percentage of the company is each investor owed for supporting the company and risking his hard-earned money?
Each time a startup borrows money from somebody, whether they are VCs, angel investors, banks, etc., they have to sign over ownership of a small share of the company to the investor. Why is that not happening here? Because they are small, gullible people?
Yes, dumb people get robbed. They are partially responsible for OR's (whopping) success, but won't see a dime. They should have done it the way venture capitalists do, and obtained a share of 10 or 20% of the company in exchange for the $2.5 mill.
Going forward, is the govt going to regulate how much percentage profit from a company's sale is passed onto the kickstarter investors?
Or coat the titanium clubs with steel or some other alloy that is less sparky...
TFA isn't about parents doing children's homework, but rather about discouraging them to help their children complete it. There's a big difference. Suppose a kid who barely understands whole numbers and addition comes across a homework problem he has very little understanding:
-2 + 5 = ?
Who's going to help him?
You're right, they both kinda suck UI wise and they carry over their 70s design decisions 40 years later. But in vim's defense, if you have a lot of commands to execute in command mode, there's very little finger effort (i.e. typing) required to execute a series of editing commands (dd, yy, p, etc). Doing the same in your typical IDE would require you to constantly hold down the ctrl, command, alt and/or shift keys while executing a command modelessly. This causes finger strain over time, not to mention it is slow. I don't think any other editor gives you cruise control like vim in command mode.
Wow, they couldn't port a simple web app into a mature language in 10 years. You have to wonder what kind of programmers they hire.
Close, but no cigar. While I'm no civil engineer, most buildings are not all that different, other than the appearance (UI). So if you have tens of thousands of homes/buildings in a city, the engineer/architect solve roughly the same set of problems in designing all those buildings. Those tens of thousands of buildings can be reduced to a few dozen types of buildings (here, a type is similar to a C++ class). So the job of creating a new building in the city would be to mainly tweak a previously designed template to obtain the final blueprint.
In summary, the building construction often requires solving the same set of problems over and over again -- a job of skill but not much creativity/invention. That's not true of software... if enough people need a problem solved it will be implemented in just a handful of libraries and not repeated thousands of times like in construction.
In a software analogy to construction, a software developer designs and builds an automated or a semi-automated robot that can construct a certain type of building. If the owner of this robot paid just the usual fixed salary that engineers are paid, the owner would profit tremendously and unfairly. For eg., It costs the robot owner 50 man years to build the robot. But once it's built, it only takes 3 man years to maintain it or build a new one. Now the robot owner charges 15% less per building than human builders and captures 50% of the market. It's a big win for the employer (robot owner whose profits multiple times more than human builders) and his customers (cheaper building). The robot owner is going to make tens of thousands of times more money than his R&D cost for the coming decades. The civil engineers and architects will continue to make money by repeatedly creating new variations of their building templates. However, the software home construction guys will soon be out of a job unless they can improve the robot some more because the compensation structure sucks -- it doesn't pay for repeating the same task over and over again like most other professions.
In summary, the engineers should get paid a royalty for every building built by their robot. Most employees get paid to repeat the same task over and over -- barbers, bus drivers, musicians playing the same set of songs, cooks, shopkeepers etc. The creative people like software devs, authors, music composers, painters, movie makers, food recipe makers etc. can't repeat the exact same thing over and over again. This class of workers should be compensated by royalty, not fixed salary.
No need to care about mixed types. But if you want to be that specific:
a) if all elements are ints, result should be an int
b) if any element is a float, result should be a float
c) if any element is complex, result should be complex.
Rule (c) has higher priority over (b), which has higher priority over (a).
I don't care what method you use, but the result should match whatever is the output a function implemented in C/C++, Java, C# function/method that averages an "int array."
For eg:
Implementing this function in C/C++, C# is very similar. Your function's result should match the result of the Java average() method shown above.
Everything you say is true when we're talking about general production of physical widgets -- the raw material and production equipment belong to you and your employee performs simple repetitive, non-creative actions to build the widget for you. But does that analogy also apply to intellectual property, like software? In this case, the employer pays for a chair, a desk, electricity, cube/office, and a computer with software. None of these items are terribly expensive and are one-time investments. A developer can easily purchase them himself.
The employer then essentially provides a spec (which is often just a extremely vague set of requirements) and a monthly salary. We can therefore say that most of the software is created by the creative talent and skill (the raw material and machines in your analogy) of the developers. Does the work created by the software dev still completely belong to the employer for a few thousand dollars because of a few words written in the employment contract? I think not! Most of software is written by developers with little contribution from the employer and therefore should be licensed to the employer the same way a song is licensed by the musicians to record labels, how writers license their books to publishers etc.
If it's nonsense, why bother with trademark and look&feel (trade dress) protection laws? Is the govt. out to extract money senselessly but provide no benefit? The truth is consumers who are not heavy users of a product/service are very likely to be confused and would think the SparkFun is a Fluke. That's my opinion and you're entitled to yours.
Are you sure? Other than the brand name, the rest of the DMM looks like a Fluke. Potential customers who have been exposed to a Fluke dmm at university or work might confuse them for a Fluke, if only subconsciously. Plus, it is sheer laziness or theft to outright copy the entire external design of a competitor's product.
I don't have 3.4, but it would be better if you could implement average using just the sum() function just so you can experience the split personality of the division operators in python 3.
As mentioned in the spec, int list should return an int. There's no confusion and no rationals because most computer programs either deal with integers or floating point numbers (rationals are extremely rare). So your function should return func([-10,-11]) --> (-10-11)/2 = -11 under the rules of integer division.
Let's take this example: Write a function that computes the average of a list (or sequence, generally speaking) of numbers. The list may contain elements that are all either integers, floats or complex numbers. The result should have the same type as an individual element of the list. So int list should return int average; float list -> float average; complex list -> complex average.
And here's the Python 2 implementation:
If you try running the same code in Python 3 with an integer list, you naturally get a float result.
Can you implement a simple average() function in Python 3 that satisfies the specifications mentioned above? You could, but it won't be as simple or elegant as the Python 2 version.
Same appearance, but prices are very different. Fluke DMMs cost $100-$150 while sparkfun DMMs cost $10-$15. That could be the reason Fluke wants them destroyed -- it will eat into their profit margin.
But that's the point, sometimes the programmer implementing "a = b div c" does not know whether the result "a" is int or float because he's writing a general library function where depending on the application "a" may be int or it be float. In python 2, he does not have to know and write "a = b / c". But that won't work in Python 3 without a lot of ugly type checking.
From reading the PEP for the "// operator" the justification for the existence of this operator is some numeric python dev was having a problem where his library users were passing ints or floats as arguments and he wanted the result of his algorithm to be a float (i.e., using ints in his algorithm were causing problems with division). And instead of just doing some smart conversion of input arguments, they decided to screw up the existing "/" operator and a new "//" divide operator.
When are they planning to connect face identification with the street/store surveillance cameras? Then they could know who is where anytime of the day unless you wear big hats, large sunglasses, fake beards etc.
With python 2, it doesn't matter if the numerator and denominator is int or float, it automatically returns the correct answer all the time -- division operator is polymorphic. With python 3, if operands are integers, you must use "//" for division. If operands are floating-pt, you must use "/" for division. This is retarded because sometimes the programmer can't know what types of a, b and c are in the expression "a = b divide c." If a, b and c can be int or float, how can a programmer implement "a = b divide c" without a lot of ugly type checking? Another poor design in Python 3.
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
Financially speaking, the author would derive better value from flipping burgers if all he got from his book was a momentary emotion of "having created something awesome."
Really? In that case, software devs should work for free as there is a lot of creativity (but not as much as an author) involved in creating software.
Then neither is sitting in a mostly empty movie theater without paying for a ticket, or taking a bus or train ride, when they are mostly empty, without paying for the ticket. In both cases, the owners of those establishments are not losing any money by your freeloading because hardly anyone is using them at that moment.
Kudos to the Hungarian lawmakers... wish other countries would follow suit. As for google maps, they should get an exception from the govt. and later remove people from photos using software. It may cost extra time and money, but it's possible and worth it.
Neither of these options are good. The first one is cumbersome and not user friendly. The second one leads to the children's unauthorized purchases.
Exactly, you can't become a samurai sword wielding ninja by vegging out in front of a flash video showing ninjas fighting and an instructor explaining tricks and theory. You've also got to pick up a wooden stick and fight.
No, $100k is not a lot of money. Consider just the fuel cost: 10 hours flying time by a Boeing 747 consumes 36,000 gallons of fuel. That's around $100k or more.
... unless other automakers follow suit.