I agree with your point that we need to defend against civilization enders. I wasn't trying admonish you for not being original, or saying that you plagiarized Nightfall. Your post just reminded me of Nightfall, and I really enjoyed the short story, so I wanted to point it out to others that may not have read it or elicit comment from those that had.
Sorry, there's no way you could have known that. I'll have to start taking seriously the proposition that the tone of 50% of internet messages are misunderstood. Must.. resist.. temptation for one-liners!
From the link above:
People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they 'hear' the tone they intend in their head as they write," Epley explains.
At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.
So where does that leave us, the dispossessed Gnome users?
Fork, obviously. But there needs to be a cohesive vision of what Gnome is doing wrong and where the fork would go. Is there such a vision, or is it just litany of "Gnome should do this" complaints that would turn Gnome into a mess if all of them were implemented?
My biggest personal gripe with Gnome has been fixed (you can now move windows off the top of the screen). Is there a web page somewhere describing the major faults of Gnome? I don't mean what just Linus thinks, but what lots of people complain about.
How nice of you. You seem to be saying that if an asteriod were about to impact the United States, and the only hope people had of surviving were fleeing to Canada (a bizarre scenario, but whatever), you'd hope that they'd be held up at the border because travel to the US got sticky after 9/11?
And because one Russian individual got the DMCA shaft, you'd like for all Americans visiting Russia to be similarly mistreated? Ethics like yours are what lead to escalative wars.
Re:This software cannot ever work properly.
on
PMD Applied
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· Score: 1
Sure but my understanding from the article is that this software is intended to replace the need for code reviews by humans.
There were many posts that pointed out that this software was not meant to take the place of code reviews. The original submitter/reviewer had it wrong. No need to rant about the Halting Problem and managers.
My tastes in formatting cannot be encoded into an algorithm.
I'm curious. Do you have examples?
And besides, how many fellow programmers do you know who have horrible formatting, but at the same time happen to name variables and types well, and document tastefully? I know none.
I don't think it's a matter of "horrible" formatting. It's just a matter of personal taste, like where the brace belongs, how many spaces to indent, etc. It certainly would be nicer if everybody could use their personal style without imposing that on others. When I browse the web I get annoyed when people expect that I have a certain resolution screen, font size, etc. What's so special about code that we can't let the IDE lay it out to suit our individual tastes?
We may disagree on this issue, but it doesn't make me rabid and emotional.
Fair enough, though the sentiment of the original poster seemed pretty rabid and emotional, with statements like "I thank God daily that I am not American." And "Gitmo makes the Japanese internment camps of WWII look like quilting bees."
Like quilting bees? The property and freedom taken from over 100,000 innocent people, most of them citizens, just because of their ancenstry? In your reply, you said "it didn't break spirits the way that Gitmo has". I beg to differ. People worked hard to realize the American dream, and then it's all taken away. Don't think some spirits were broken?
You're right, of course, that being locked up in a cell and tortured is quite different than what happened to the Japanese. Drawing moral equivalences between the two isn't straightfoward, given the nature of the crimes, the number of people, innocent vs "enemy combatant", etc. I think it is pretty indefensible, however, to talk about "quilting bees" when speaking of the Japanese internment, and so I guess my ire was directed more at the original poster than you.
But speak out or have a difference of opinion and goto jail.
You did not give a single example of somebody who went to jail for merely speaking out or having a difference of opionion. Hysterical rantings do not help anything. Focus on specific issues.
Given the state of today's government, the politicians, the graft, the greed, the plutocracy, the abuse of power, by all rights the US government (and all three branches) should have been overthrown long ago as charged by the Declaration of Independence.
You could probably say that at nearly any time in the nation's history. Sometimes moreso than others, and certainly there's lots of bullshit going on, but I don't think the country has fallen over the edge. I'd say any "revolution" would result in something worse, not better.
I'd say the scale of the offense was worse than Gitmo. "Oh, you're of Japanese ancestry. Say goodbye to your property and freedom." That happened to over 100,000 people. How many people are in Gitmo? And how many are American citizens? How many were capturing during battle? Saying Gitmo is worse than the Japanese internment is pretty insulting to those who were forced into an internment camp because of their ancestry.
Don't get me wrong, what's going on at Gitmo is evil, but overstating the case just makes you look rabid and emotional.
What's wrong with Haskell's syntax from a Human Interface perspective?
The original poster never answered your question, but as a long-time Java programmer I can tell you my experience in trying to learn Haskell. I think there are two issues here, when considering Haskell as a "UI" for the programmer to the machine. One is syntax, and two is concepts. Haskell is radically different in both, and this makes it harder to learn the concepts, which are more important than the syntax.
For syntax, lack of parenthesis is confusing. When you combine that with higher-order functions and partial application, it gets really confusing. What you are presented with is just a stream of words. If Lisp is hard to look at because of all the parenthesis, then Haskell is the opposite. And yes, point-free style adds to the confusion, but it was there without it. I also found myself getting confused with parenthesis used for grouping vs tuples and the idea from other languages that a parenthesis means a function call.
Datatypes were also confusing because they were again, just a stream of words, and it was too easy to get confused between the typename, the constructor name, and parameters to the constructor. Being so used to something like Foo(int a, String x) makes it hard. All these problems are really just a matter of getting used to the notation, but they are the kinds of problems that somebody learning a language like Ruby coming from Java wouldn't have.
As for concepts, in general I find recursion and lazy evaluation much harder to think about than a while loop. Here's an example from "Haskell for C Programmers" that I'm sure would get many C/Java folks' heads spinning:
fibs = 0 : 1 : [ a + b | (a, b) <- zip fibs (tail fibs)]
Higher-order functions and partial-application are also hard to wrap your head around. Not the basic idea (a simple map is easy enough), but in trying to figure out what some clever bit of code is doing. Took me awhile to figure out what this did the first time I saw it:
map (map (const 1))
It's a lot of pain, especially when you know you could easily do whatever it is you were trying to do in your familiar, imperative language.
Here is what Yusuf had to say regarding the artificial controversy generated by the British tabloids.
That could be a bit of revisionist history. Wikipedia has that quote, and some more:
"[Rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie] I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing."
"[If Rushdie turned up at my doorstep looking for help] I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is."
Those are based on a recorded TV show, referenced by a New York Times article. I checked the New York Times reference.
And it disgusts me that foul-minded bigots such as yourself would repeat those tabloid lies about him in an attempt to discredit an entire religion.
The New York Times is not a tabloid. And the fact remains that this "kind and gentle person" believes that a man should be put to death for blasphemy, because that is what his religion tells him.
And I want people to use apostrophes. Will you start doing that? Will Microsoft change Vista to your liking? Will games start working seamlessly in Linux?
Remember: no one who wants reliable information would ever use torture to get it, because torture never produces reliable information.
I don't believe in those absolutist statements. I'm not arguing for torture, and yes it can give you bad information, but it seems reasonable that sometimes you'll get good information. If you can corroborate that information then you can deal with the bad information. Saying otherwise is just a cheap way out of the argument.
I've seen doctors who I thought made bad decisions, but they weren't intentionally cheating anyone. How could they do that without other doctors noticing, when everything's recorded in the chart? Is it all a big conspiracy?
Have you heard of Dr. Moon? I saw this story on 60 Minutes or something years ago. Pretty scary shit. One of the guys was getting ready to be operated on when one of the nurses told him to leave. Lucky for him he did and avoided unnecessary heart surgery.
There's all sorts of stuff you can do. Fingerprints, some kind of pin entry on the card itself, or just stick with the current system of ATM card + pin number that you transmit. Requiring a physical card for online banking will get rid of the vast majority of phishing scams and credit card fraud that goes on now.
The bank and credit card associations could get together and do something reasonable today, instead of these silly hacks like SiteKey.
I think it's a crappy system. More junk to remember, and it wouldn't suprise me in the least if didn't occur to me that the SiteKey wasn't being displayed, especially if you don't log in daily.
They really need to stop fucking around with band-aid solutions and get a real hardware token solution that's built in to the ATM card.
If the user takes a trip leaves their key at home or somehow just loses it, then they and the bank have both a problem that costs money and aggravation. Carrying around another key is also an added burden.
They already issue physical cards for ATM access. That should have the key built into it. Nothing extra to carry around.
Re:Are we really making it better for us, or worse
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 1
I'm curious about these companies because un my experience, companies take licenses very seriously.
In my experience, it's up to the developers to be license-aware. I've never been told about the importance of respecting licenses or to be careful about using third-party software.
The only exception to this rule, I suspect, is if your own people are more incompetent than everyone else, so whenever you try to do anything in house, it's botched up. Yes, there are plenty of places like this. If you're in one of them, I can't help you.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your point that we need to defend against civilization enders. I wasn't trying admonish you for not being original, or saying that you plagiarized Nightfall. Your post just reminded me of Nightfall, and I really enjoyed the short story, so I wanted to point it out to others that may not have read it or elicit comment from those that had.
Sorry, there's no way you could have known that. I'll have to start taking seriously the proposition that the tone of 50% of internet messages are misunderstood. Must.. resist.. temptation for one-liners!
From the link above:
Fork, obviously. But there needs to be a cohesive vision of what Gnome is doing wrong and where the fork would go. Is there such a vision, or is it just litany of "Gnome should do this" complaints that would turn Gnome into a mess if all of them were implemented?
My biggest personal gripe with Gnome has been fixed (you can now move windows off the top of the screen). Is there a web page somewhere describing the major faults of Gnome? I don't mean what just Linus thinks, but what lots of people complain about.
Your fantasy reminds me of Nightfall.
It's called artistic license. Haven't you seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
How nice of you. You seem to be saying that if an asteriod were about to impact the United States, and the only hope people had of surviving were fleeing to Canada (a bizarre scenario, but whatever), you'd hope that they'd be held up at the border because travel to the US got sticky after 9/11?
And because one Russian individual got the DMCA shaft, you'd like for all Americans visiting Russia to be similarly mistreated? Ethics like yours are what lead to escalative wars.
There were many posts that pointed out that this software was not meant to take the place of code reviews. The original submitter/reviewer had it wrong. No need to rant about the Halting Problem and managers.
I'm curious. Do you have examples?
I don't think it's a matter of "horrible" formatting. It's just a matter of personal taste, like where the brace belongs, how many spaces to indent, etc. It certainly would be nicer if everybody could use their personal style without imposing that on others. When I browse the web I get annoyed when people expect that I have a certain resolution screen, font size, etc. What's so special about code that we can't let the IDE lay it out to suit our individual tastes?
Geeks != math geeks
Fair enough, though the sentiment of the original poster seemed pretty rabid and emotional, with statements like "I thank God daily that I am not American." And "Gitmo makes the Japanese internment camps of WWII look like quilting bees."
Like quilting bees? The property and freedom taken from over 100,000 innocent people, most of them citizens, just because of their ancenstry? In your reply, you said "it didn't break spirits the way that Gitmo has". I beg to differ. People worked hard to realize the American dream, and then it's all taken away. Don't think some spirits were broken?
You're right, of course, that being locked up in a cell and tortured is quite different than what happened to the Japanese. Drawing moral equivalences between the two isn't straightfoward, given the nature of the crimes, the number of people, innocent vs "enemy combatant", etc. I think it is pretty indefensible, however, to talk about "quilting bees" when speaking of the Japanese internment, and so I guess my ire was directed more at the original poster than you.
You said:
You did not give a single example of somebody who went to jail for merely speaking out or having a difference of opionion. Hysterical rantings do not help anything. Focus on specific issues.
You could probably say that at nearly any time in the nation's history. Sometimes moreso than others, and certainly there's lots of bullshit going on, but I don't think the country has fallen over the edge. I'd say any "revolution" would result in something worse, not better.
I'd say the scale of the offense was worse than Gitmo. "Oh, you're of Japanese ancestry. Say goodbye to your property and freedom." That happened to over 100,000 people. How many people are in Gitmo? And how many are American citizens? How many were capturing during battle? Saying Gitmo is worse than the Japanese internment is pretty insulting to those who were forced into an internment camp because of their ancestry.
Don't get me wrong, what's going on at Gitmo is evil, but overstating the case just makes you look rabid and emotional.
The original poster never answered your question, but as a long-time Java programmer I can tell you my experience in trying to learn Haskell. I think there are two issues here, when considering Haskell as a "UI" for the programmer to the machine. One is syntax, and two is concepts. Haskell is radically different in both, and this makes it harder to learn the concepts, which are more important than the syntax.
For syntax, lack of parenthesis is confusing. When you combine that with higher-order functions and partial application, it gets really confusing. What you are presented with is just a stream of words. If Lisp is hard to look at because of all the parenthesis, then Haskell is the opposite. And yes, point-free style adds to the confusion, but it was there without it. I also found myself getting confused with parenthesis used for grouping vs tuples and the idea from other languages that a parenthesis means a function call.
Datatypes were also confusing because they were again, just a stream of words, and it was too easy to get confused between the typename, the constructor name, and parameters to the constructor. Being so used to something like Foo(int a, String x) makes it hard. All these problems are really just a matter of getting used to the notation, but they are the kinds of problems that somebody learning a language like Ruby coming from Java wouldn't have.
As for concepts, in general I find recursion and lazy evaluation much harder to think about than a while loop. Here's an example from "Haskell for C Programmers" that I'm sure would get many C/Java folks' heads spinning:
fibs = 0 : 1 : [ a + b | (a, b) <- zip fibs (tail fibs)]
Higher-order functions and partial-application are also hard to wrap your head around. Not the basic idea (a simple map is easy enough), but in trying to figure out what some clever bit of code is doing. Took me awhile to figure out what this did the first time I saw it:
map (map (const 1))
It's a lot of pain, especially when you know you could easily do whatever it is you were trying to do in your familiar, imperative language.
That could be a bit of revisionist history. Wikipedia has that quote, and some more:
"[Rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie] I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing."
"[If Rushdie turned up at my doorstep looking for help] I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is."
Those are based on a recorded TV show, referenced by a New York Times article. I checked the New York Times reference.
The New York Times is not a tabloid. And the fact remains that this "kind and gentle person" believes that a man should be put to death for blasphemy, because that is what his religion tells him.
Because paying people money to advertise leads to an unpleasant environment. The moderators should always mod down sponsored referrer links.
Ah, interesting. Sorry to nag, but I'd say that you shouldn't use it until apostrophes work.
And I want people to use apostrophes. Will you start doing that? Will Microsoft change Vista to your liking? Will games start working seamlessly in Linux?
I don't believe in those absolutist statements. I'm not arguing for torture, and yes it can give you bad information, but it seems reasonable that sometimes you'll get good information. If you can corroborate that information then you can deal with the bad information. Saying otherwise is just a cheap way out of the argument.
Have you heard of Dr. Moon? I saw this story on 60 Minutes or something years ago. Pretty scary shit. One of the guys was getting ready to be operated on when one of the nurses told him to leave. Lucky for him he did and avoided unnecessary heart surgery.
There's all sorts of stuff you can do. Fingerprints, some kind of pin entry on the card itself, or just stick with the current system of ATM card + pin number that you transmit. Requiring a physical card for online banking will get rid of the vast majority of phishing scams and credit card fraud that goes on now.
The bank and credit card associations could get together and do something reasonable today, instead of these silly hacks like SiteKey.
Maybe "based on a true story" or "inspired by true events" is more accurate. It has about the same integrity as a Hollywood movie.
I think it's a crappy system. More junk to remember, and it wouldn't suprise me in the least if didn't occur to me that the SiteKey wasn't being displayed, especially if you don't log in daily.
They really need to stop fucking around with band-aid solutions and get a real hardware token solution that's built in to the ATM card.
They already issue physical cards for ATM access. That should have the key built into it. Nothing extra to carry around.
In my experience, it's up to the developers to be license-aware. I've never been told about the importance of respecting licenses or to be careful about using third-party software.