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cruise02

1,853 karma · joined January 20, 2009

Computer programmer currently living in Charlotte, NC.
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cruise02··on The Poll Aggregators of the Future Are Reproducible and Open Source
Open source would not be nearly as impressive as reproducible.
cruise02··on Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)
It isn't arrogant to assume other people are at least as well read as you are. It would be arrogant to assume that they aren't.
cruise02··on Programming books you might want to consider reading
It probably isn't if you're coming at the material for the first time, or after a long break. I took a 15-week course in Linear Algebra a few months ago, and we only covered about half the book in that time. I spent just about every weekend and evening doing those exercises. It's very time consuming.

However, if you gave me my old College Algebra book, I might be able to skim through it in a month of weekends and refresh myself on most of it, because I've used that stuff a lot in various jobs. Same goes for a lot of (but by no means all) programming books. I'm immersed in that stuff daily, so I can get through it pretty quickly.

cruise02··on Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)
> Periodically over on Stack Overflow (and in many other programming forums) the question comes up about what books are good for programmers to read. The question has been asked and answered several times, in several different ways. The same group of books always seems to rise to the top...
cruise02··on Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of Essential Films
If you have to make this kind of leap to support your argument, you don't have an argument.
cruise02··on Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of Essential Films
That's not discrimination against young people because it's not saying that young people aren't allowed to ride the bus, just that they have to pay the regular price. (Also, most children in the U.S. are bused to school for free. Is that not the way it is in the UK?)
cruise02··on Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of Essential Films
Yeah, I'd hate to be exposed to eight more great films if they were made by women. /s
cruise02··on 50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math)
Please do advertise that since there's a reason for stereotypes, your company uses them in making hiring decisions. Let me know how that goes over.
cruise02··on 50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math)
Use some common sense. For how many values of $x that would be the subject of an interview question are 5 year olds going to be better than grandmothers?
cruise02··on 50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math)
"...to a 5 year old" should be pretty safe. "...to your grandmother" could be construed as both sexist and ageist, so I'd avoid it.
cruise02··on Owner of Peet's to buy Keurig for almost $14B
And yet, people still don't make a new pot when they take the last of the old.
cruise02··on AI service gives Wikipedians ‘X-ray specs’ to see through bad edits
If a bot can detect that you "don't buy feminist agenda," then it is evaluating based on content, not on sex or race.
cruise02··on Academic Assholes and the Circle of Niceness (2013)
That's all fine and good in an environment where people can actually come to physical harm, but this article is about academia. I think we need to stop excusing asshole behavior in academia and IT.
cruise02··on Novelist warns against utilitarian trends in higher education
J.K. Rowling pays her tax.

http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-on-high-taxes-2012...

cruise02··on Instead of Standing, Why Not Lie Down While You Work?
I guess I can understand how people might become confused if their concept of socialism comes from a single satirical book about egalitarianism.
cruise02··on Instead of Standing, Why Not Lie Down While You Work?
> Instead of helping everyone...

Yes, that's exactly what socialism is based on.

cruise02··on Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
There's another potential asymmetry between the number of times you write something vs. how many people read it/how many times it is read.
cruise02··on WHO says processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes
Also note that an increase from 0.5% to 0.6% would be the same amount of "increased risk." Always look for the base rate.
cruise02··on WHO says processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes
Yes, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase is significant, but it's nowhere near the bloodbath that an increase of 18 percentage points would be, which is how I think most people would read "increased risk by 18%."
cruise02··on WHO says processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes
It's important to understand what "increased risk" means.

From the linked article:

> The IARC’s experts concluded that each 50-gram (1.8-ounce) portion of processed meat eaten daily increased the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%.

From a related article:

> To put this in perspective, the lifetime risk of colon cancer is 5 percent. If you have a hot dog every day, your risk goes to 6 percent.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cancer-sausage-red-meat-world-he...

cruise02··on Mimic – abusing Unicode to create tragedy
Only one character is going to be marked in this case, not a whole line or section of code. Deleting it and retyping it costs one second. I guess I've seen more than my fair share of encoding issues. I used to tutor at a university, so students were constantly coming in with code they'd copy/pasted out of their assignment (usually a Word doc) or from a web site.
cruise02··on Mimic – abusing Unicode to create tragedy
> Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error

I'm not sure how frustrating this would be. Wouldn't most people just delete the character immediately and type a new one?

cruise02··on ESPN to lay off nearly 4% of workforce amid changing pay-TV landscape
They can start with everyone who is involved in translating sports stories into emoji.
cruise02··on Twitter CEO Dorsey Apologizes to Developers
It's not officially Fall until Lucy pulls away the football.
cruise02··on How Amazon and Jay Carney Lost the Game of PR – And How They Could Have Won
Yes, I read the article, and I understood it. But thanks for explaining it to me anyway.
cruise02··on How Amazon and Jay Carney Lost the Game of PR – And How They Could Have Won
I can't tell if this is satire or not.

> In this instance Amazon went back into the mud to correct a perceived wrong with logic and clarity.

I find it interesting that we now view "logic and clarity" as a bad thing, while changing the subject and appeals to emotion are good things.

cruise02··on Amazon Spars With The Times Over Investigative Article
Innocent people will swear that they're innocent when you falsely accuse them, too.
cruise02··on What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
And when it comes to supporting corporations (biased or not), this is mostly a right wing media thing. Just because they do it from opposing sides doesn't make it ok.
cruise02··on How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords
It's possible to update everyone's password without them logging in. If the old storage was just MD5(password) and you want to update it to MD5(bcrypt(password)), you're out of luck. You need the plaintext password to make that change. If instead you change your new storage to MD5(bcrypt(MD5(password))), you can take all of the hashes currently in your database and update them at one time with MD5(bcrypt(old hash value)).
cruise02··on Lyft vs. Uber: Visualizing fraud patterns
How do you let someone cancel over 1500 rides from the same phone number? Pizza delivery places had this figured out decades ago.
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