chubbard

Two observations. First, great how do we debug it? How can we see our signals between each step? How about beyond simple print/logging?

And two, I like his contrast between async vs synchronous flows, and recognizing synchronous style programming has many benefits that CPS doesn't. However, I think even this style still hasn't solved the bigger problem with asynchronous style programming. The ability to reuse it easily. In synchronous style programming I can reuse code and add to that block by calling the method, then after that method is done add my code.

   ... my code before ...
   var result = someMethod()
   ... my code after ...

It's just that simple with synchronous style. With async style the author has to provide you a hook to hook onto the end or beginning of this flow (adding a callback param, returning a promise, etc). I think even with using signals you have the same issue. Without explicit hooks you can't hook more code onto it like you can with good old fashion synchronous programming. Not to mention error control flow is turned upside down too.

I'm intrigued by the ideas of signals over callbacks, but I don't know if they fix enough problems with callbacks yet.

"Another reason why Android is losing on the developer front is that development environment setup and usage, even for Java, is worse than Apple's. It's usage of Eclipse is like duct tape and glue."

I think this is mere perception vs reality. Android development environment is far superior to XCode. Using IntelliJ for Android Development is a true pleasure working with Android. I have no problems debugging over USB on my Mac ever.

The game industry is incredibly rigid to any change. Once they've found their horse they will not walk away from it, and show little interest in changing how they approach development ever. This isn't the first time we've seen some long article with game studios wringing their hands over any change.

Well not exactly the same. While you may be able to determine some basic relative positioning information just from looking at the picture, it's not the same as having the actual GPS coordinates. While you could do some perspective math plus relative positioning to known other locations to figure a rough estimate of an object it would require a fairly expert knowledge to get to the coordinates for your mortar. With GPS it's much easier for someone with far less expertise to come up with a position.

Point taken that there is important information you could get from a picture alone. There's lots of other information they posses that GPS doesn't, and vice versa.

So I guess this works best because most of us can't understand the lyrics so if we did this with an english song or any song the native listener understands you might end up with nonsense lyrics. It doesn't sound like it's jump around making nonsense sounds, but it might string words together that are really bizarre as it bounces around the lyrics.

Well you made a great original comment, but unfortunately, some of the replies want to politicize your observation trying to assign a "side" to it. It's a very social sciences observation so it's hard to prove and for some probably even accept.

I'd add as further proof to your observation was look at how even government organizations position themselves in the last decades. Remember the army of one commercials that were meant to appeal to that very individualism attitude. Military in the US is the antithesis of individualism. If you join the military you are told when to wake up, how to dress, what to do, when you'll do it, and how you'll feel about it while doing it. Chain of command is rule number one in the military. It even has processes so that individuals can't be completely responsible. It's too dangerous. But, here we have a campaign to tell you that's not true, and in fact you have autonomy because that's what our society assigns value to now.

You are not judging it just stating an observation. There is no wrong or right to it.

I'm not saying these last 40 years haven't had merit. The recession of 1982 probably was probably the symbol that put the nail in the collective view to problem solving. When Reagan turned that recession around i think the country started to believe individuals could solve these problems over government. You listen to people who were in the work force and they remember the change. My father references that in shaping his political views and he's not the only person I've heard say that. It was an important milestone and shortly after we saw the rise of me generation which evolved into personal liberty movement. And an emphasis on individual expression and thinking in our schools. And this is how we viewed problem solving required. But it also shaped us in what problems we wanted to solve because if we had a problem that didn't lend itself to this approach we didn't solve it. Questioned if it was even a problem (global warming fits this as others).

I think these are two strategies you can take. One isn't more dominant than the other. But each has their place along with pros and cons, and you have to use both over time . It just depends on the problems you face which strategy you should employ.

In many ways this article is just pining for other big hard made up problem for us to solve. Apollo was and is still a huge achievement, but it sure wasn't a practical solution to any real problem we faced. As much as you can say how amazing it was there are plenty of things you can say how wasteful it was too. In a lot of ways you can say the same thing about the internet.

I wonder if the big problems we know we have ever really get solved or we just distract ourselves by solving made up problems. Funny thing is life seems to get better when we solve the made up problems because we solve things we didn't know we had.

Oh that probably doesn't bode well for Global Warming and Cancer.

I find this very insightful so we're talking about a modern day tower of babel. But, instead of a destruction of a common language it's a destruction of a common set of values. We stopped believing in government due to a difference in values we saw. That gave rise to a change in values of individual expression over collective work. And now we can't collectively agree so the problems we can solve are smaller because we create smaller and smaller pockets that agree.

Hey it's very stylistic which means it's of limited use in general, but I could see it being used in certain situations. I think what makes it impractical is how tall the menus are in the demo. If the menus were smaller then the fold out, roll up effects would happen much quicker (<1s) which would make it less annoying to watch. It takes almost 5 secs to unroll. You can adjust the speed of each menu item (default 0.8) so lower than to 0.4 and it might be less cumbersome to use. I think it's a neat effect.

Remember they all made their fortunes pre-1913 so those monies weren't subject to taxes when they earned them. They lived well past 1913, but by then they were giving most of it away. Post 1913 they paid income tax on the money they earned it was just being giving away.

I was going to retort to your statement about changing failure rates saying that's not side of the equation we're talking about. If we take this as the number of startups we create as:

   numberOfSuccessfulStartups = startupAttempts * successRate

Then Jon Stewarts observation is by lowering risk failure we raise the startupAttempts. Not only do we raise the attempts, but we can recycle the failures to drive startupAttempts up more resulting in a higher number of successful startups is his hypothesis. Adding health benefits, tax credits for loses, etc drive up startupAttempts by lowering risk.

However, your observation that making things cushy for entrepreneurs could lower successRate because you don't have to hustle as much. Sort of a if I fire this gun above your head while you work maybe you'll work harder argument. I say that in some jest because I think there is some merit to your observation just how much I don't think either of us know.

The one counter I can provide to your counter is that lowering risk might have the same effect as lowering incentives for results. Basically support from this work on how incentives can lower success if they are too high. What I'm saying is maybe if risk is too high fewer people attempt and even fewer people succeed because there aren't enough original ideas to copy for scale.

http://carmine.se.edu/cvonbergen/Incentives.pdf

(Couldn't find a better link.)

I think both hypothesis have their points and we need more data to support them.

Great Scott! It's just crazy enough it might just work!

I've always felt that America's psyche is evolving us to a "Everybody's a CEO." mentality. With the introduction of 401K we upped the risk taking, driving white collar workers into consulting away from full time employment with benefits of incorporating, tax benefits of corporations, preferential tax treatment of capital gains vs salaries. These are all incentives to create your own corporation over being a salaried employee, but they all involve taking more risk. We are rewarding risk more and more while devaluing safety. Not passing judgement per se, but making an observation that America might be interested in this if they understood it. And that America might need this anyway because we are pushing more people into accepting the risk without their choice. (see 401K as an example).

Another side benefit to this is it might drive up competition for workers because more people might be interested in working for smaller companies because benefits are more equalized. Driving competition for workers means higher salaries too on a whole as they compete for the talent. That's the real societal benefit.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to pay myself entirely in dividends over a salary I think they might give me an honorary 1%'er membership. :-)

But on the other hand. All I know is that it won't be that much fun when everyone is doing it. It never is.

For a hot minute this post was right above this post.

http://doctrina.org/Javascript-Function-Invocation-Patterns....

Had to giggle a little over this silly discussion of FP and are there design patterns or not. A strategy is the same intent whether you use a enclosed function or an anonymous object as the strategy. Remember the old computer programmer adage. Objects are the poor man's closure, and closures are the poor man objects.

Does "You are only as strong as your weakest chain" mean anything here? It seems like the letter of the law here is not expressing the intent of the law. Sure, Part 3 didn't explicitly mention don't store it on a client machine because its such a stupid thing to do there wasn't a point to expressing it. Doing such a thing completely undermines the entire PCI documentation because who cares how it's stored,transmitted, etc at the trusted source if it's written out to significantly less secure sources. Just go steal it from the least significant secure source. I fail to see how this language argument has any real point.

Or maybe you just don't frequent ATMs a lot. I've definitely seen OS/2 Warp reboot screens on ATMs in the US.

Well it might not be your government that institutes this idea. Given this is a bank in the UK you or I might not be allowed to vote on this type of thing, but if general populous begins to see the choice of technical decisions are more in the hands of the professionals and not so much the company it could very well change. And it might be companies that push legislation like this if they feel they don't want to bear the legal risk.

Now usually there is professional insurance that consulting companies have to purchase for liabilities just like this. If you are consulting firm implementing systems for banks they will require you carry $2 millions/dev of insurance should there be a screw up like this.

Maybe this is the best option because I'm not exactly behind supporting measures to certify or regulate our industry, but I fear bad behavior like this might force it. This is a hack rookie mistake. I'm fully aware of the ramifications of doing something like this, but I'm not immune to mistakes that could result in the same damage. However, a law like this would treat me the same way as these hacks.

These hacks better be glad this industry isn't regulated like other professions where the individual professional is liable for his work. If these developers were doctors or engineers they personally would be liable for damages. Right now we have laid blame at the feet of the company, but this company doesn't seem to understand they don't have the technical know how to be building websites for their customer base.

It's an article about a socialist democrat from a liberal leaning publication and how a smear campaign of EPIC proportions was created to thwart his chances. Weird Right!? </puns> How did Fox news miss this one too?! </sarcasm>

Yea I got over that. Shit happens. Don't sweat the small stuff, yada yada yada. Besides when you fix it everyone lights up. It's the closest thing I've seen to a performer doing some amazing stunt with me being the amazing person. Focus on that, and not so much on that it broke. The difference between developers and non-devs is we can fix it, and that's really cool power. This article is almost like Wolverine complaining about his super powers being lame and always having to save the day. YOU'RE WOLVERINE STFU!

I think after being a programmer I have changed my outlook for the better because I realize what's possible instead of being trapped by other people's ideas/mistakes. I see how things are connected and if I changed this or that how it changes our limitations. Anyone can say "What if" very few can "Here's how." And that is really empowering and liberating.

I suppose when I was younger I was negative I wanted everything to be perfect like it couldn't be, but as I matured I see bugs, missing features, bad design as just opportunities and not the end of the world. Being late, bugs, complaining users, whatever it just doesn't bother me.

I'm not tuning them out just choosing to listen to what's really important and cutting through the bull because I expect all of it to happen. We're late ok I'll work a little more realizing I can really only make it about 10% faster, there bugs give me a reproducible test case and I'll fix it, users bitching reach out to them personally and find out what's the real problem.

And just like anything else in life, whether it's programming, football, music, or ditch digging, your attitude is your choice. The difference came when I chose to be positive...and laugh a lot more at all of the irony, bad choices we make, and gotchas that always creep up. Laughing really helps.

Problem with that is technology typically can't be both cheaper and yield the same performance. It can be cheaper but yield less performance or more expensive with higher performance. The more expensive technology typically is a sustaining technology, but the problem here is that not enough people want to pay more for a clean technology so we can't start to make it cheaper without government funding. It almost doesn't matter what we do because we will be dwarfed by the CO2 output of Asia if it uses conventional fossil fuels.

As we move away from coal burning the price will fall, but coal producers within the US will simply export the cheaper fuel to countries like India and China. Unfortunately, the overall picture hasn't changed because the coal that was being burned within the US is merely being burned in other countries without the US environmental restrictions. We might be actually worse off environmentally due to the same amount of coal is being burned globally.

I'm getting pretty tired of technology review extremely poor explanations for science discoveries. I only know vaguely more than I did when I started reading the article. When I got to the bottom I didn't know if I should be excited or not.

But I felt like the authors of this game realized how predatory most IAP are and while they didn't specifically say its disgustingly exploitive to children they did say they were trying to design a game that wasn't exploitive. After reading their article I'd say they are just giving away too much. I think the free to play X levels then pay to play more is not predatory IAP. It was bread and butter of the shareware scene for the better part of a decade during the pre-internet era. And that's what we're in right now with mobile that time period where the difference between amateur and professionals is invisible. So I think they're model is right they just aren't applying it correctly.

This is a little out of date information. Dictionary attacks and publicly accessible Rainbow tables have existed for quite some time (late 90s probably). Salting your passwords was an important way to break rainbow tables, but doesn't prevent, only slows down, dictionary attacks. And now with GPU assisted computations salting techniques won't protect you. I almost think discussions like this should just cut to the chase and say use Bcrypt with proper iteration counts to thwart modern brute force attacks. I realize this is a 3 part series, but talking about rainbow tables is like discussing the proper way to hold your buggy whip.

I hope they are successful, but I think the work Robert Bussard's work sounds more promising. The reason Fusion hasn't work to produce net energy is inherent to the tokamak design. You spend too much energy charging up the magnets to keep the plasma from colliding into the wall. Which is why more material is constantly added to the mix. Bussard currently holds the record for most fused particles/second (I think that's the metric) beating Farnsworth's record set in the 60s. Neither of them used Tokamaks to set their respective records.

He has made significantly more progress towards the goal of net energy production from Fusion over 40 years and billions spent on Tokamak research. I think his ideas have lots of promise, but oddly enough society hasn't trained people in this type of science in decades.

Problem is Bussard passed away not long ago so progress on Polywell is slow since there are very few people out there with the technical know how to pick up where he left off. But, still he has left quite a lot of documents and details about what he has done. I hope research continues.

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2012/...

Neat story, but did it need to be 5 freaking pages long? I read the first 3.

Dude it's just a pep talk we tell each other to focus us on executing over psyching ourselves out with over thinking, over strategizing, and noise of others telling us its stupid. Kinda like you're doing now. Apparently you'll need a new customized phrase to help you focus so here it is: Shut up and just do it.

It has nothing to do with sewage.

Blackwater got it names from the swamps surrounding the area: "the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp on the North Carolina/Virginia border, now mostly a National Wildlife Refuge...There, he created his state-of-the-art private training facility and his contracting company, Blackwater, which he named for the peat-colored water of the swamp.[10]"

But apparently if Blackwater wanted to shot the person that named it they can do that.

"And humans, with their ability to thrive in basically any climactic zone, are the ultimate pest species." Oh I don't know cock roaches thrive really well in every zone too. And they carry countless diseases too, along with their redundant systems and all. Or how about rats? Also littered with pests themselves there isn't a place on this earth that hasn't been touched by rats.

I do not understand how this really any different that what we already have with anonymous classes/interfaces. If we have to continue to define interfaces for our lambdas then we might as well continue to use anonymous classes and remove the final restriction (that's completely backward compatible). The final restriction wasn't required in the original design of anonymous classes before the community freaked out over memory allocation of primitives. The reason closures are a pain in Java is having to meet the static typing declarations using interfaces for our anonymous classes. The whole point to this was to create a compact syntax for declaring methods that take lamdas as parameters without resorting to interfaces.

I also wish that default mechanism could be extended to existing classes as well so we could add methods to classes because the real question is what are the API changes to collection, File, etc with respect to the addition of lambdas. The places where Java has fallen short in the past is the API (Collection.join? Collection.map, Collection.reduce, new File( String... paths), etc).