biotech

This is a common problem with group projects in school. One of the main problems is lack of leadership. The solution: assign a leader.

I had a class consisting of 4 projects, 4 people per group, and each project had a designated leader which rotated. These projects were so much easier to manage, because the leader had some authority given by the teacher. He therefore had the ability to delegate responsibility and people would actually do it. In normal groups, even if a leader emerges, they will often be ignored by less motivated students, because their authority is much more tenuous.

My point: it helps to have an assigned (and verified by the teacher) leader for a group project.

This is actually a great suggestion for anyone who works with Excel a lot. Knowing VBA (VB for Apps) can save you (or your assistant) hours of repetitive work. Here's a good way to learn:

1. Notice some annoying task that you do regularly in Excel (e.g., importing a data file, preforming a calculation on a data set, or laying out data in a visually pleasing way).

2. Find the Record Macro command, then do the task again.

3. Excel automatically creates source code for the macro. You can open up VBA from some Excel menu; that will show you the code.

4. Edit the code to do what you really want. Often the generated code isn't perfect, or there are other features that you'd like.

I will warn you though - VBA is kind of a horrible, poorly documented language. It's not unusable, though - you just don't want to use it for large projects.

It would be nice to see some clear, thorough coding standards for C++ that chose a reasonable subset. I haven't found many publicly available apart from Google's Style Guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... . Anyone know of any others?

Keep in mind, though, that reasons for many of those restrictions have to do with maintaining compatibility. This may not be as much of an issue with newer projects.

OTOH, Google's coding standards is probably the most thorough, well documented, clear, and easily available set of C++ coding standards out there. For this reason, I don't think it would be a horrible decision to use them for a new project.

Not true - the biggest problem with Microsoft's add on was the lack of an easy method of uninstalling it. All I ask is that vendors do two things when installing add-ons to firefox:

1. Ask my permission before installing.

2. Let me easily uninstall the add-on.

Cheers to that! Every programming language home page should have a quick way of getting to simple sample code. Erlang does a decent job of this: "Getting Started" -> "Getting started quickly" gives you source right away. Most P/L sites do not make it easy to find a code sample.

I agree in theory; that many tabs are pretty difficult to manage. Unfortunately, a garbage collection cycle forces me to focus on garbage collecting (since I will usually have several important sites open among the trash), breaking my concentration on the research. It ends up being more productive to leave them open for a while, until they reach some threshold where I have to do too much work to find the important open sites among the garbage. That point for me is definitely more than 25 but also less than 100. I assume that it's different for different people.

1. Yes, I would like to know the editors of each article.

2. "The chief-of-staff probably assigned that story over the alternatives, which would have been biased (because she's human too) - so do you want her name?"

I don't want only her name, I also want to know the reasoning she used to chose these particular stories over the others.

Although I realize that you are [probably] being critical, I do believe that you have some good suggestions. Even if this introduced more overhead per story, I believe the quality of each story would increase dramatically.

- Lack of Context; this actually can be split into the first two points that this article makes: "The longstanding facts" and "How journalists know what they know".

- The Monopoly of the Associated Press. The argument against monopoly is hardly unique to the press, though.

When I read an article in the newspaper, there are many questions that come to my mind.

In the worst case scenario, I'm reading an AP article which omits the author's name. WTF? The author's credentials and background (including their history of previous articles) are very important in certain cases (and at the least gives me some idea of where they are coming from).

Any technical researcher who writes a paper must provide references to be taken seriously. Journalists should also have some obligation to cite background materials. If they take a quote out of context, they should tell me where I can find the full discussion. If there is some important historical background to the story, I'd like a reference to that information as well.

Kyle J. Von Bose says:

I bought this to power a home-made submarine that I use to look for prehistoric-era life forms in land-locked lakes around my home town in Alaska. At first I wasn't sure if this item would (or could) arrive via mail, but I was glad to see it showed up with no problems. Well, almost no problems.

Unfortuantly my mom opened my mail, because she does not respect people's privacy. She was pretty upset to see Uranium Ore. After a long argument and me running away from home again, she finaly stopped being such an idiot and I was able to get back to work.

The quality of this Uranium is on par with the stuff I was bying from the Libyans over at the mall parking lot, but at half the price! I just hope the seller does not run out, because I have many projects on my list including a night vision sasquatch radar, an electromagnetic chupakabra cage, a high velocity, aerial, weighted Mothman net and super heated, instant grill cheese sandwhich maker.

Are you thinking about some particular religion, or religion in general?

A man can impregnate many woman in this same period of time. All of these woman have a good chance of creating offspring, so the main concern of an individual woman is finding a man who will be able to provide for her child. This is a complex requirement - it isn't necessarily sufficient to just look at a man to gauge his ability to secure resources. Also, the energy cost of becoming pregnant is extremely high for a woman. Therefore, the woman reacts based on a large number of variables. She also assumes that other woman are searching for a man based on similar requirements, so the fact that a man is surrounded by other woman increases his value as a potential mate.

I realize that this simplifies things quite a bit, but I think the fundamental argument is sound.

Well said. I use C++ and Perl primarily, and both languages suffer from this.

Then you should end the interview immediately. Sorry, pal.

It seems to me that few programmers would answer the question this way, competent or not. And it's probably not true for most competent programmers... I wonder if Jeff has actually received this answer from a interviewee.

so:

Change in Calories Stored = Calories In - (Calories Excreted + Calories Burned)

As someone else said, though: these variables are not independent.

If you eat less and exercise more and still aren't losing weight, I guess that means you are excreting less.

Because emacs users and vim users are disjoint, despite having almost everything else in common!

Ironic that he should say this, considering that a considerable portion of his communications relate to meta-discussions.

Any small company will be priced out of business by the big telco companies. It's a pseudo-monopoly, where a small group of huge organizations have an implicit agreement which maximizes profit for all of them, and keeps everyone else out of the running... (Actually, it kind of reminds me of the two-party political system in the US)

robg's son - Code optimization (result pending)

aristus - Circuit debugging (turned out to be very useful)

J_McQuade - How to tend goal (skill no longer applicable)

biotech - World geography and history (good to know in social situations; I work with, and live near, people from all over the world)

Anyone else?

If you wish to have good control over what you're eating, whether that means avoiding gluten, casein, animal products, soy, etc; your best bet is to prepare all of your own food. Don't eat out, don't buy preprepared foods at the market.

Disclaimer: I'm not quite disciplined enough to follow that advice, and I know that I end up eating small amounts of gluten. It's a trade off between stress and nutrition, I guess. Since vegans usually don't get sick by eating trace amounts of non-vegan food, my advice is to just deal with it. And be happy that you don't have a lot of real food allergies (unless you do, of course).

The problem with IT, generally, is lack of respect. Because it's something that looks easy and looks like something anyone could do, people don't respect experience and talent.

For some reason this just doesn't work in other fields. While everyone feels they can put a sticking plaster on a cut, they go to a doctor for more serious stuff. Any fool can build a garden wall, but if they want a tower block one hires an architect and a construction company and lets them do decisions.

Whereas, it's quite common in IT for micromanagers to overrule the professionals.

It doesn't happen in building. Managers simply aren't allowed to say things like "Oh, I don't think we should RSJs in those load bearing walls". If the architect says they're needed, then they go in. We also don't hire doctors by picking the tools they'll use. When you want a doctor to take out an appendix, you want a qualified general surgeon. You don't ask them whether they prefer a #3 or a #4 handle on their scalpels.

And yet it's pretty common to see projects which have picked a technology first ("Oh we're going to use J2EE for this") and THEN hire the team around that ("Wanted, tech arch, 5 years exp with J2EE, C , C++, JAVA, Perforce, Apache, Perl, Python.") and only at that point produce the spec. And then if the job isn't one the technology is suited for, that ends up being the developers fault and they're the ones who work overtime to put that square peg in the round hole.

It's scarcely surprising that a) almost nothing works properly, b) there's constant chaos and that therefore c) almost no-one finds their work rewarding in ways other than money.

I freely admit that a lot of my time, I feel like some sort of thief. I sit in projects which are doomed. They're more doomed than a plane that's lost both wings and is on fire. I see the people around the project running about setting more of it on fire as it hurtles towards the ocean and removing more control surfaces and making it worse. And I watch developers switch in and out of seats as we trail wreckage and smoke down. And it's always been like this. The project is a free-fall disaster before I join and after I leave and there's just nothing, nothing, nothing I can do to rescue it at that point in time. And yet I'm being paid to be there.

And I feel bad about that. I feel that I ought to be being paid to achieve something. But usually I'm just being paid to sit in a seat in a vehicle performing a ballistic trajectory straight into its crash site. And even if I quit then the next thing will be the same and whoever takes my place in this seat will be in the same situation.

And this is not how I wanted to work. I wanted to build things that people wanted. Not turn up at an aircrash and fill a seat in it for a while. And while it's financial fulfilling, it's not very emotionally fulfilling.

Most bridges don't fall down. Most patients don't die. Most IT projects are a failure in one way or another. It's like being a surgeon back in the days before anaesthetics or antibiotics. Most of our patients die... and that's got to be bad for morale.

And I can't help but think that this really has its roots in the fact that people think software is simple enough that they can exercise control over it at a level they ought not to be and that they also don't want to pay what it actually costs. Architects generally don't compete on price and you don't get to tell architects that their idea of how strong structural steel is is an underestimate you can feel you can ignore in this project. But people time and time and time again pick the cheapest option for software, design it like they'd design a tin shack and then act surprised when the end results turns out to be flimsy tin shack instead of a tower block. Katie Lucas Thursday, June 25, 2009

Here Atwood links to a very insightful blog post by Paul Buchheit: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-is-wrong.h...

To continue the quote:

"...but it was a simple question asked in simple language."

Yes, a simple question, with two perfectly valid interpretations, as described by Buchheit. When I first read the question, I interpreted it the "wrong" way. The simple language that is used to ask the question is too simple, to the point of not being specific.

"I think what they're really objecting to is how unintuitive the answer is."

No sir. I am in fact objecting to the wording.