sofal

37 ms·

331.
by sofal 17y ago
This hypothetical "factually wrong" dilemma is a red herring. The real issue is disagreement, not factual correction. Much more often the case is that someone has written a thoughtful, honest comment based on some worldview that is very dif
332.
by sofal 17y ago
It doesn't seem to me like you're familiar with any reserved, risk-averse people. No guy who is actually interested in a woman will pick option 2. In fact, it's a non-option. Picking option 2 is a "bah, she's out of my league" decision. I
333.
by sofal 17y ago
The example of a Nash equilibrium in A Beautiful Mind was completely wrong. A real Nash equilibrium assumes that no player regrets their strategy given the knowledge of everyone else's move. In the case of the Carol Syndrome (or the "solu
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by sofal 17y ago
This applies to the food industry as well, like how we get our meat. We'd be better off if the things we buy were responsibly produced and priced. It's hard to know what we can do about it besides voting with our dollars and educating other
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by sofal 17y ago
Your comment did not point out anything other than the fact that you personally think Atwood's articles are useless. It did not contribute anything to the discussion, and it garnered knee-jerk upvotes from people who, like you, hate Atwood'
336.
by sofal 17y ago
Not as useless as your comment. Besides the "my code is the worst code" part, I thought he did an excellent job of explaining a software developer's natural aversion to software. I had my wife read it, and it helped her understand more abou
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by sofal 17y ago
The repercussions of the unfalsifiable idea can be useful and falsifiable to a degree. They aren't always negative, either. For example, "I feel safer and sleep better at night because I believe my garage is inhabited by undetectable dragon
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by sofal 17y ago
The main teacher definitely knew how to fight (Mike Winkeljohn, look him up), but I'm definitely with you on questioning the type of training and the standards by which belts are rewarded. The problem is that a lot of karate places are not
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by sofal 17y ago
Absolutely agree. I would also add wrestling. Any kid who did wrestling easily had me on the ground screaming before I could get any fancy blocks, punches, or kicks out (it is always a bad idea to try to kick a good wrestler). Basically, an
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by sofal 17y ago
He puts way too much faith in karate to help his kids learn how to fight back. Karate does not teach you that. I was in karate for years as a kid and got a black belt. I took karate for the same reasons he's putting his kids through it. I w
341.
by sofal 17y ago
But it's boring to use. I've been trying to figure out what you meant by that. I noticed you had a tweet a couple of weeks ago: I have decided that JRuby is officially boring. It "just works" in a terribly predicable manner, and the Java
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by sofal 17y ago
I had a heck of a time trying to get my company to use one of his excellent libraries. Why? Because they saw Zed's "professional" home page for the library and documentation and didn't want to be associated with that kind of persona. "It's
343.
by sofal 17y ago
More like http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Monday_Night_Football/1...
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by sofal 17y ago
Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest discussion
345.
by sofal 17y ago
Even better than that: http://quietube.com/
346.
by sofal 17y ago
I'll just state here that this is also what powers _why's excellent Hpricot HTML parser. Back in my last job, I implemented a Java libconfig clone using Ragel. It was the most fun I ever had at that company.
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by sofal 17y ago
I'm not sure if others feel this way, but I'd actually rather see someone's free form artsy drawing than a UML picture. I think it's reasonable to expect that a skilled developer should be able to provide an intuitive whiteboard diagram or
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by sofal 17y ago
I'd go even further than that. I trust my wife with all of my passwords and as far as I'm concerned she can go ahead and use any of them at any time for anything she wants. It's really not a big deal. I married her, for heaven's sake. What
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by sofal 17y ago
Your code should be robust enough to provide an intuitive default behavior for corner cases like that. That way the application code doesn't need to be cluttered with special conditions.
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by sofal 17y ago
Bagger at Albertsons ("courtesy clerk") at $5.15/hr, during high school. I've never had so much financial freedom in my life.
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by sofal 17y ago
Being skinny definitely has its downsides. I've only recently begun weight lifting 3 times a week and running for half an hour 3 times a week. Walking into a gym for the first time is a very intimidating experience. It seems like every man
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by sofal 17y ago
Every life lesson that you learn from experience is just a statistically irrelevant anecdote and results in the refinement of a crude heuristic or generalization mechanism for your limited human brain. Never did this fabricated fable state
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by sofal 17y ago
It just so happens the only conceivable purpose of the original story was proving something. Absolutely wrong. The purpose of the original story was to provide an illustration. Now, if he had anecdote which helped you remember, say, the
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by sofal 17y ago
My definition of "enterprise developer" comes directly from working in a gigantic financial company as well as an even more gigantic government defense contractor. Would you like some more anecdotes?
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by sofal 17y ago
I agree somewhat. An anecdote is a tool, and has been shown to have a more powerful effect on the minds of a population than solid evidence. However, I think that anecdotes offer much more than just a way to avoid having to prove your point
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by sofal 17y ago
* "Lines of code" is a meaningless metric. Please stop using it.* I can agree that LOC is a terribly abused metric, but it is not completely without meaning. It's just really rough and better left untouched in decisions involving money. I
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by sofal 17y ago
It's not intended to "prove" anything. It's an anecdote, used in the simple, appropriate way that anecdotes are always used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdote
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by sofal 17y ago
First, they are anecdotal. There is no inherent evil in anecdotes. This is obviously fiction and was not intended to be used as evidence. If it were, then you would have a reasonable complaint. The purpose of a little story like this is (
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by sofal 17y ago
I think that enterprise teams typically follow strict syntactic coding standards and then check off the "maintainable" and "readable" requirement from that alone. Additionally, they generate mountains of bloated Word and PowerPoint document
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by sofal 17y ago
Imagine trying to write a Java bytecode interpreter in several different programming languages. This would be much easier than what you're thinking, because the libraries already exist and they didn't have to be written in straight up Java

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