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User: joss

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  1. > It will happen.

    So will the heat death of the universe, but I'm not holding my breath.

    For what you wish to come true, there would need to not be such a thing as GPUs otherwise new games will always all their high settings to exploit whatever additional power the GPU provided. Forget about it.

  2. yeah, the questions could get harder as you go up...

    You are about to send this message to 1.2 million people. To continue, please enter the grid coordinates of the holy grail:

  3. Re:That's fine on Uber Loses Right To Classify UK Drivers as Self-Employed (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    That well known socialist Winston Churchill understand the problem well enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    "It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil. ... . But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes the trade up as a second string, his feebleness and ignorance generally renders the worker an easy prey to the tyranny"

    We have employment laws for a reason, and the reason is countries with strong employment laws are far more prosperous and pleasant to live in.

  4. Re:I've always found age discrimination odd on Age-Discrimination Suit Against Google Seeks Class Action For Engineers (dailymail.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    > it's not like experience is all that important in a brand new field

    What brand new field ? There's no such thing. You could be writing drivers for teleporters using a quantum computer for all I care, experience still helps.

  5. you have to be kidding ? on Ask Slashdot: Have You Migrated To Node.js? · · Score: 3, Informative

    I used node for a while, I should have known better, but it sure made a change. Not a good change, but definitely a change. I think this explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  6. Oh .. I forgot to mention the most important gadget of last 60 years is probably the shipping container. This has had an extraordinary effect on our lives by (a) drowning us in cheap goods and (b) decimating local manufacturing.

  7. The plough was a lot more influential than the wheel. Without the plough we would never have progressed far enough to need the wheel. It provided the surplus which all over advances depend on.

    In the last 100 years the most influential gadget is the washing machine. It released women from the home into the workplace, transforming society. The computer probably ranks second in importance in last 100 years but if the computer/internet combo had done as much good as one would hope then we would be a lot smarter than we are and the given answers would be less ridiculous.

  8. Python and Ruby are similar languages, and yet the cultures around the two are very different. A certain segment of Ruby has moved to node.js now.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  9. Re:TL;DR? on The 'Trick' To Algorithmic Coding Interview Questions (dice.com) · · Score: 1

    It depends on the job. Some jobs it's not relevant, other jobs it is. For a general purpose programmer, the more they understand the better.

    Sure, a library for the common problems already exists, but if you can't provide a reasonable stab at the standard stuff yourself, then you have no chance of solving the unique problems that you may run across. Also, if you're familiar with the algorithms used for standard operations: reverse, random shuffle, sort, that kind of thing, then you will recognise when aspects of your problem already have solutions.

    You may as well ague there's no point teaching kids to add and subtract by themselves because they can use a calculator.

  10. and here is the entire collection: :-| on Finland Releases National Emoji Collection (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Finns will understand

  11. Re:Lack of protection on Why the Snowden Situation Shows 'Protected Disclosure' Is Critical (zdnet.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Something was rotten in the state of denmark.

    Snowden's revelations caused a huge shakeup in the intelligence community. Such as a federal judge ruling that the NSAs blanket collection was unconstitutional. If things were right beforehand, none of this would have happened
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

  12. Re:Reasons things fail on Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures (ieee.org) · · Score: 2

    Do you think the people running corporate IT programs are spending their own money ?

    No, ok.. well, do you have any evidence that large government run IT programs are more prone to failure than large commercial sector IT programs ?

    I think it's more a question of people are not very smart and large scale software development is hard.

  13. Re:$900 Million from the Koch Brothers on 2016 Election Cycle Led By Billionaire Donors · · Score: 1

    > Climate change is either provable or not

    Yeah, whatever, I'm sure you're all about the science. No scientific theories are *provable*, gravity, evolution, whatever, they're all theories. It's just that the preponderance of evidence that makes them some theories more likely than others.

  14. just f*cking stop it on Startups Push 3D Printers As Industry Leaders Falter · · Score: 2

    How many non-news articles can you possibly print about 3d printing.

    I worked for 3d systems in the 90s, it was fun and vaguely novel back then. I have been hearing about this stuff like its the next new thing for over 2 decades, and what are the fantastic advances we've had during that time.. no, don't tell me, please, seriously, don't. We don't get 5 articles a week about virtual reality, or jetpacks, or flying cars,

  15. Re:Hate in 3, 2, 1... on Node.js v4.0.0 Released · · Score: 5, Funny

    > I've literally never heard anyone make anything that works using Node

    I made a good chunk of the backend of http://www.manything.com/ using node, and it all works .. supporting 100,000 s of customers perpetually streaming stuff to a bunch of servers.

    Having said that.. Christ on a bike, I would not use that technology again: it's the most snake pit infested dangerzone I've ever encountered. Writing multiprocess c++ code for transputers with no tool support back in the early 90s was a fucking breeze compared to the extraordinary clusterfuck that is node. Node with javascript/coffeescript on the server gives you new and interesting ways to shoot yourself in the foot and then helps you wipe off the wound with a nice bloody rag you were donated from a leper who died of ebola. It's an exciting environment to be sure, but I'm done with that.

  16. Re:NodeJS on PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM · · Score: 1

    I went down that route. However, I really missed being able to write code like this:

    1 do this
    2 do that

    as opposed to

    do_this(function(err,res) { if (err) {something..} else { do_that(res) })

    Once your backend gets complicated, may the lord help you.

    If you backend is simple, it doesn't matter what language you use.

    There is a far superior language you can use on both ends: scala - scala.js is really nice

  17. Re:Not sure what to worry about here on The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks · · Score: 1

    this guy explained the problem better than i can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  18. the article is bullshit on The Programming Talent Myth · · Score: 1

    And the reason it's bullshit is that it starts from the premise that if you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution.

    Programming ability is exactly the kind of thing that does not fall in a normal distribution. It's not even close to a normal distribution. It's more like wealth distribution, there is no meaningful average.

  19. that guy is for real on Singapore's Prime Minister Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Code · · Score: 2

    He was Senior Wrangler while at Cambridge. Plus, his son is one of the most productive scala programmers in the world despite only doing it in his spare time. These guys ain't dumb.

  20. Re:Ok, I am naive, but... on Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday · · Score: 1

    Sure, I know. Few things are truly novel and one has to be able to do all of it, including the grunt work. It's just that there's no point doing something original when its faster to copy, so one copies up to the point where either nobody has done it before or its just easier to reinvent it oneself than find and incorporate somebody else's solution I just took that attitude a little earlier than I was supposed to. I wasn't trying to be clever, I just wasn't ready to start working hard at the time.

  21. Re:type of assignment on Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday · · Score: 1

    Do you mean, the repeated code, or the cool professor is as likely as winning the lottery ? Either way, its more common than that.

    Same thing happened to me in college, except I didnt even discuss the assignment with him. It was a lisp project and we both decided to do it as purely as possible (which at the time meant no assignments - what today would be called functional style). The end result was about 150 lines of lisp (equivalent to maybe 2k lines of C). Our code was identical except for some identifier names.

  22. Re:Plagarize smart on Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday · · Score: 1

    The last program I had to write in first year CS was a plagarism detector. Surprisingly easy.. just do a frequency analysis on keywords and that will get you 90% of the way there. So, I actually did this assignment unlike all the others that I had cheated on...

  23. Re:Ok, I am naive, but... on Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday · · Score: 1

    When I did a CS degree I cheated hard through first year.

    1. I was young and lazy, my main goal was to maximize time I could spend in the pub.
    2. There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it

  24. Re:congratulations america, theyre still winning. on LAX To London Flight Delayed Over "Al-Quida" Wi-Fi Name · · Score: 1

    Fair point generally, but..
    > Heart disease kills 600 million americans a year
    600 thousand, not million

    > we still sell vape kits
    vape kits reduce smoking deaths

  25. Re:Prison population on As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Leaded petrol has a high correlation with crime rate too.

    The nice thing about the abortion correlation theory is that it pissed off both the left and the right.

    Saying that we should reduce the number of children born by unmarried mothers and this will bring the crime rates down is something that excites the right and pisses off politically correct lefties.

    Saying that a good way of doing that is legalising abortion excites the left and pisses off the right