mr_crankypants

10 ms·

31.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
In this particular situation, I would be much quicker to go for copy/pasted code than spaghetti code. I worked at a place where we had to interact with financial exchanges, which nominally talk standard protocols but actually all have
32.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I submit that a filter predicate is an instance of the strategy pattern. The biggest difference between the two approaches is that one makes for a much less interesting UML diagram, so nobody ever really bothered to declare it a Design Pa
33.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Funny you should mention global data structures. Last winter, when doing Advent of Code, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I didn't really need to be writing super well-factored Clean Code™ with no globals or anyth
34.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
It's unfair, but also pretty decent. For my part I've often wondered if design patterns being such a big deal in OOP is really a failing of the object oriented paradigm itself, or if it's just a reflection of how, ironically
35.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Going with that premise for the sake of argument: Nah, probably not. But that premise is well-known to be in conflict with established reality. Identifying specific individuals from these sorts of data points is famously, disturbingly easy
36.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Google built their empire on contextual advertising, but it's not the only kind of advertising they do these days. Also, Google's revenue isn't necessarily derived from what ads provide the highest ROI; it's derived from
37.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Possibly. But, at the same time, "it is reasonable to assume" is the epitaph carved into the gravestone under which economics's credibility got buried alive. I'd feel better assuming that question's answer is simply
38.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
That's about the only gimme, and it'll only cover a portion of the hypothetical payoff for the ad - some other, potentially larger, number of people never click, but do remember and come back later. Or if you're trying to sel
39.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
The open secret there is that it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, and embarrassingly easy to come up with metrics that would make basically any ad campaign look like a success without looking suspect to anyone but a t
40.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Not just more concise; less error prone. A reasonably large number of the bugs I encounter relate to the order or number of formatting arguments not matching the slots in the format string. It's pretty hard to make that kind of mistake
41.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Such languages exist. Ones that come to mind offhand are: Standard ML, FORTH, Pascal, Prolog. All of which are ones that I once thought were quite enjoyable to work in, and still think are well worth taking some time to learn. But I submit
42.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Me, I am old enough to know Perl, and I've got plenty of one-line skeletons in my own closet. And it more-or-less entered the world already vastly more TMTOWTDI-y than Python is after 3 decades. FWIW, I tend to think of comparisons to
43.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
They didn't; it was strictly forbidden. But, also according to TFA, they nonetheless found cigarette butts on the scaffolding.
44.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
> Mr. Prunet added that sprinklers were not added because they would “drown the whole structure.” Waiting for the fire department to show up and start spraying the structure with high-pressure hoses in order to contain a fire that got mu
45.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
According to TFA, no, but they are nearly certain it was accidental. Top candidates include faulty electrical wiring and cigarette butts.
46.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Watching it happen can be quite a slice-of-life event. One guest who wanted to see my city's Chinese neighborhood was rather bitterly disappointed upon seeing it. "But it's just like any other neighborhood, only the convenien
47.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
It's identifying the collocations so that you can do that replacement that remains an imperfect science.
48.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
Sense2vec isn't really what I'm waiting for. It relies on word sense disambiguation, which tends to be one of those very language-specific things, and so I'd expect (but haven't verified) that, like other techniques that
49.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I haven't been following the literature too closely lately - have there been promising results in using it for topic modeling or semantic vector modeling? My own sense is, the real problem that the space needs to contend with isn'
50.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
A related thing that amuses me: One of the (less popular†) benchmarks for embedding models is their performance on a TEFL word analogy test. At least as of the last time I perused the literature, which was a few years ago, there was one alg
51.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I don't really want to knock anyone, either, and volunteering is great, but I find the implication that there's something skeevy about paying a fair wage to the people who supply a charity's backbone labor to be kind of bothe
52.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I believe you may be conflating food banks and food pantries. Food pantries are places that distribute food directly to people. Food banks are centralized places that distribute to soup kitchens and food pantries, not to individuals. They e
53.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I haven't made a formal study, but I think that it still ends up still being a smaller language. Scala doesn't have a lot of keywords, but it does have a lot of overloading of what those keywords do. It's something I have t
54.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
One that might bridge that gap is learning a language. It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others,
55.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
It's certainly led to plenty of problems, but, having happened closer to now than to the birth of Java, it's not really a candidate for "original".
56.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
If you're just looking for a cleaner type system, you might give Kotlin a look first. It gets you that, while remaining a much smaller and simpler language than Scala.
57.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
I think the most interesting attempt was the Shavian alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet They all have their shortcomings, of course. Possibly the most universal one is that none of the ones that I
58.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
There was https://www.makershed.com , which is currently out of business. It mostly only sold kits, drones, 3D printers, stuff like that. Very little in the way of individual parts and tools. Which always struck me as a bit of a
59.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
TBH, of the 3 alternative reasons you present, I kind of view all of them as being somehow related to my gripe. "Dwindling creativity" because all these expensive tools are creatively limiting. For example, 3D printing is cool, bu
60.
by mr_crankypants 7y ago
If it's DIY, it's DIY, even if there's not a single bit of 3D printing, casting, forging, milling, or electronics involved. One thing that has historically put me off about the maker community is these artificial distinctions

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