calambrac

Given that you were critiquing #67 as though you thought you already understood the information, I felt it was fair game to call you out for being wrong about it. Apologies.

If you change an object's prototype, that object is no longer "of the same constructor". "Ninja.prototype = { 'swingSword' : ...}" is, in fact, a completely different, far more dramatic action than "Ninja.prototype.swingSword = ..." You shouldn't at all have the expectation that the two are anything alike.

Which is what #67 says.

It is not true if you assign a new object to the prototype

Which is a completely different thing.

Not quite sure how the latter follows from the former...

You assert this without saying why, except to say Eric Sink said it first. You could at least provide a link to his explanation, I couldn't find the magic Google incantation to find it myself.

He doesn't need to do that at all - for example, if he's running a windows machine, he can just install TortoiseSVN and set up repositories on his local machine. Dead simple.

My bad, I misused the word server. I meant that best case you're still setting up the repository in one folder and then doing all your work in another. On the premise that managing and understanding why you're managing two places is harder than just working in one, git is simpler. I didn't just make that up, that's how the systems work.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority...

I'm pretty sure you just made that up.

Which is about as hard as understanding the difference between "your wallet" and "the bank."

Once you've grokked it, yes, it's simple, but if you're managing your own system on your laptop, for instance, it is a bit of a leap to wonder why you have to install the server in one place and work in another, etc. It's not that it's hard, it's that it's harder than git.

I like how you chopped off the "and even then, the only 'savings' is you don't have to stage first" part of my statement about working with only one branch.

And I personally don't think the day-to-day use is any easier, either, unless you're only working with one branch, and even then, the only 'savings' is you don't have to stage first.

Mathematicians are dumb.

It contains exactly one piece of "useful" information, the link to the disabled account FAQ. The rest is just simply terrible. It starts with a very serious accusation, intoning "significant risk" and "financial damage", but Google wasn't "compelled" or "forced" to act, it "decided" to, implying not that some mandatory threshold was reached but that someone sat down and worked it out and reluctantly agreed that this was the way to go, or worse, that sometimes similar situations might go the other way.

Immediately after accusing the person of being an evil bastard, it turns on the smarmy fake politeness. "Please understand" that we think you're an evil bastard. "Thank you" for understanding that we think you're an evil bastard. And thanks for "cooperating", even though you actually have no choice in the matter at all. If you have any questions, kindly fuck off and don't use the same method of communication we just used to reach you, here's a link to more standardized dehumanizing copy.

It reads like Google is breaking up with you while checking its phone, acting like you've done something horrible enough to merit no discussion on the matter, trying to act nice enough so you don't think it's a bitch, but making it clear it doesn't give a shit and really never did.

Reputations are important.

http://www.igroup.org/schubert/papers/jostmann_lakens_schube...

The experiment design has an interesting flaw: the values that the users assigned to the questions were indicated by marking a position on a line, not by writing out a number.

In other words, they might have simply measured where people who don't give a shit about answering questions in a stupid survey make arbitrary line markings on a sheet of paper when having to struggle a bit to hold up a heavy clipboard, versus when easily holding a light one.

And again, I never argued that people are rational about money, I'm just pointing out that the particular behavior the op talked about was irrational. If you're getting defensive because I'm pointing that out, and you agree that it's irrational, then I don't know what the argument's about.

The fact that studies exist doesn't make their conclusions (or your interpretation of their conclusions) true. The specific studies you brought up in your articles all sounded like they had pretty big flaws, given they were applied to 5 year olds and college kids in contrived situations. If I got a stupid ribbon just for drawing a picture, I'd feel embarrassed and patronized, and of course I wouldn't want to do it again for the same person. That doesn't prove that humans have a weird quirk that responds poorly to external motivators, it just proves they have understandable emotional responses to weird situations. Real life, otoh, provides ample evidence that people respond productively to external motivators all the time.

As for not having a conversation anymore, were we ever? You keep throwing Teh Studies at me, ignoring the reasons I gave for why I don't think they're valid and dinging me for pointing to one that wasn't perfectly applicable to the original situation (even though I was only using it as an example of disagreement with the studies you had brought up, some of which themselves weren't perfectly applicable, either). If you want to pretend like you're the dignified salon member adhering to the rules of civilized discourse, that's fine, but I don't think it's accurate.

Didn't you say you used RoR? You're okay with using other folks high-level code, but you think interacting with them will pull you towards the middle of the bell curve. Interesting.

Bottom line: people do respond to external motivation, all the freaking time, as long as its appropriate to what they're being asked to do. Refusing to be paid to do what you'd be doing anyways, no strings attached, is, plain and simple, irrational. But, in reality, very few people ever get the opportunity to exercise that irrationality, because when someone pays you, there are pretty much always strings attached, and the strings are what are demotivating.

I'm also confused why you think your bug story supports your point. Are there lots of developers who derive great personal satisfaction from churning out bug reports? Leaving aside the fact that #bug reports is a shitty metric, they did go up when the reward was introduced. The fact that they went down again after the reward was taken away means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation, because they weren't internally motivated before.