fragbait65

I've been a technical advisor for several startups, I'd say that overall this advice is wrong.

Most startups stay in it way longer than they should.

I'm happy that things worked out in your example, but they generally don't. Mostly because founders reason with their feelings instead of applying logic, statistics and probabilities of success.

I don't agree. Deceiving and lying are two different things. You are describing somebody being deceptive.

You can deceive somebody and still be 100 % truthful.

Is that actually a good example of what you mean? There is no contradiction? The first statement does not say that Joe drove drunk?

Exactly!

I think I'll just write something similar and wrap Apache with a shell scrip, claim that it's a web server written in bash, post it here and see what reaction I get, just for shits and giggles.

It's not exactly the same though. Stolen cars does not have the potential to affect your daily day life as broken software can.

I agree that the blame does not lie on the engineers that created the cars or software though. In the end it's a problem of cost, you could write better software, but it would cost you time, money and shifted focus in the education of software developers and so on. Users are not willing to pay for that cost, they are very upset when reality bites them in the rear though...

I agree, Siberian cold due to changed flows of different currents seems more likely as the end result due to climate change for the Nordics rather than increased temperatures.

Increasing temperatures now does not equal increased temperatures later, when the system has stabilized again.

I'm not saying it will happen, just that it seems more likely with what the current data seems to imply, my current information is from some pop culture article though, so I'm the first one to agree that that information might be wrong.

My company that I work at actually closes bug reports that has been in "pending customer feedback" for more than 6 months automatically. The customer is free to re-open the issue at a later date if it's still an issue.

I personally think that's fine. You'd have the time to verify and close every issue in a perfect world, but the world rarely is. Before that we had 100+ issues open with bugs we could not even reproduce that where open for years. It just becomes clutter at that point.

I think some incremental improvements could be done for C, question is if it's worth the time?

Maybe it's better to just use a better tool for new code bases?

I agree.

The difference is that engineering over all is mature enough that you can make incremental changes over time and it still does not invalidate what you did previously. If you built a bridge 10 years ago its probably safe enough to leave standing even if you can build a safer bridge today.

The same cannot be said for programming yet. It's hard to improve the safety of the tool, the C compiler, without breaking your past bridges or having to redo the work again, i.e rebuilding the bridge.

Well, I agree that you can wish that the tool was better designed, that's a whole different thing though.

What I meant to say, in a rather roundabout way to be fair, is that the problem is both the language and the programmers. C is a tool that is too hard to use correctly, but the programmers who write crappy C code are to blame for their crappy code. It's another thing if an expert fails to use the tool safely, then one might blame the design of the tool used.

There seems to be 2 camps, one camp blames C and one camp blame it on poor programmers. Poor programmers have given C a reputation and the tool itself is too hard to use correctly, even for experts, so both camps are right and also wrong...

I think some of the decisions made for C back in the day where fine, C was designed to be lightning fast and close to the metal, but I think it's time to pivot. I don't think it's necessary to sacrifice security to squeeze out the last percent of "speed" today. C has a lot of legacy code still in use though, so I don't think it will ever happen, that's why I use other languages for production code today and only write C when needed for C code bases still in use.

Well, I do think a programming language is a tool and it is kind of wrong to blame the tool for the mistakes made by the one wielding it.

The problem with C is that it's a tool where you have no safety and I don't think there's a programmer alive that can actually use it in a safe manner. I guess some are close, but they will still end up with the occasional wound here and there on their bodies...

I would probably avoid using C for anything I put in production today, I still love the language though. It still feels special, sitting down with all that power at your fingertips knowing that you'll have a built in buffer overflow if you lose focus for a second, gets (no pun intended) my blood flowing! :-)

Sounds a bit weird? Who signs an NDA at a job interview?

I agree, especially since a portion of the "new" movies are regurgitation of old classics anyway and more often than not weaker than the original movies.

Well, I can agree with that!

Chances are that your code base will be untestable, at least for unit testing, if unit testing where not considered at all when writing it.

I used to do TDD, I found that it didn't work that well for me.

I still think that the code base you work on dictates how you should be testing. It also dictates which testing strategy I use.

I test for different things when writing C than I do when I write Python for example. My testing strategy is different if I write a networked C application compared to if I write a Ruby on Rails app.

Also the tools I have available to me when writing the code dictates how I will test, which is tied into which language I write in.

And I really disagree that code has to be awful because you are not forced to write unit tests. I work with a team of 4 other experienced and responsible programmers. We actually don't have to have rules that force us to do anything. We are responsible enough and experienced enough to know what to do and when to do it.

40 - 50 % of our code base doesn't have a single unit test, because it doesn't have to have any. Are we infallible, no. Does mistakes happen? Yes. Do we sometimes go back and add unit tests to code that we thought didn't need any. Yes, it happens.

Would unit tests have saved us sometimes? Yes. If it would have, then we are responsible and go back and add that test.

I think it's a failure to ever believe that unit tests provide any correctness proof. The only thing you achieve with unit tests is to prove that you are still bug for bug compatible when changing your code.

I think experience is needed to know when to unit test. Some code might not need any tests at all while other code might need quite a lot of tests.

My personal experience, for the code bases I work on, shows that for those code bases mocking is usually not beneficial, we find more problems with integration testing and fuzzing. That holds for those code bases, it might very well be different for other code bases, and here's where experience comes in again...

Yes, I agree. The question is what the system need to change into?

I'm not an expert, but it seems that all known political and/or economic systems fail in the face of greed and selfishness. Or maybe greed is the effect of a failed political system, either or all known systems are a failure from my perspective.

I think capitalism balanced by laws has worked best so far, but you seem to need so many laws that it creates loopholes. I.e blacklists doesn't work that well, especially not a complex blacklist. (And I'd even suggest that the blacklist has been trojaned by lobbyists and other agendas.)

I'd say wealth and education, but in most counties wealth and education go hand in hand, so I agree with what you say.

The problem is that we have elected leaders that only care about being in power. They will happily watch the world burn unless a majority of the voters want them to move.

Sadly I don't think most people are ready to make the necessary sacrifices to stop climate change. At least not yet. And I think we will pass the point of no return before people are ready to make those sacrifices.

The problem is not technology or scientific, the problem is human nature.

I mostly agree with what you say, but I don't think any other economic/political system would do better than capitalism. The problem isn't really with which system you use, no known political/economic system can handle greedy/selfish entities, be it people, groups, companies or countries.

And enforcing rules like the Geneva convention will not work for the same reason. There will always be entities that bend or circulate the rules. (Example: Geneva Convention and the US and China (Not bashing the US here, just stating facts)

There will never be any saving the climate unless the US and China are onboard, and currently they are not. I might see that the US could be in the future, but currently China is hell bent on being the number one super power and they are ready to break some eggs on the way.

Problem with that, especially in the US I think, is that the majority of people will not like what you are doing. The only way to enact change is to get the majority of people on your side. What you suggest will only antagonize people though...

What you suggest has only ever worked through history when protesting slowly enlightened people and the majority of people chose to support the protestors over time.

I think the US is so divided and fed up from BLM and the election chaos at the moment, so enacting change that way is a hopeless cause.

Current news suggest that they are upping the threshold to 3 children trying to stimulate population growth due to needing to increase their available work force in the future.

These measures are not as extreme as the last time they stimulated their population growth, which lead to the one child policy. We'll see if they feel that this stimulation is enough or if they will try to increase the incentive even more if they don't feel as if it is enough.

You are probably correct.

I didn't really mean to suggest population control, even though I wrote just that. The problem as I see it is that everybody tries to approach the problem as if it will be solvable by technology.

The only way I see that we can solve a climate crisis or the survival of humanity long term is to actually work together. Which I'm pretty certain will never happen, since there will always be greedy and selfish people.

I agree with everything you say.

It's actually not a science/technology problem. The problem is human nature, and that's not solvable with technology. If it was, then everything would be rather simple...

That's not my point.

My point is that there's no need for population control. The problem will eventually solve itself.

I think humanity is doomed as long as there are egotistical and greedy people and there's nothing you or I can do as individuals.

The problem is lack of resources, so I don't think the problem is solvable with with technology.

And just for reference, I actually am very successful in a field where you do have to empathize with people to be successful. That's actually what makes me bitter, I empathize and all I see is greed and selfishness. It's human nature, and that can't be solved with technology or science.

I agree with what you say. I didn't mean to say that the the population growing is the actual problem. I mean to say that lack of resources is the problem. (Too lazy to create a link) https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state...

We would still consume too much resources even with population decline.

Sure, lets say we fix climate change. I think the only viable way to actually do that is for everybody agree to live as people did a few hundred years ago.

People seems to believe that we can solve climate change with technology. I think that's a pipe dream.

I also think that it's a pipe dream thinking that the world will band together and "solve" the climate crisis together. I think Covid-19 has showed us that humanity does not band together in a crisis, each country and even each individual will use the crisis to make moves to benefit them.

And it doesn't matter what you do as a individual, most resources are consumed by large corporations anyway.

Honestly, why bother?

The earth isn't dying, the earth will be fine, it will recover over time, humanity on the other hand needs to be reduced.

If it isn't climate change, an epidemic or something else, then it will be war over resources some time in the future.

On the other hand, climate change will probably lead to war anyway, since resources like water and places to live will decrease from that, so war is probably in the future anyway, since world population continue to rise, especially since the Chinese seem to allow 3 children moving forward.

I personally wouldn't, but everybody has to decide for themselves.

I at least know a few companies that would avoid hiring people who criticize old employers, afraid they will be next. I mean, most companies have at least some "skeletons in the closet" of bad practices or what not.

Having said that I'm usually brutally honest in job interviews, I see it as my way of screening companies, if they don't want the honest me, then I would probably not fit the company culture anyway. So there might be nothing wrong with having an honest blog in the end, maybe you receive less offers, but the offers match you more.

The reason they don't want to do anything other than security updates, and sometimes not even that, is because they need consistency across calculations over time.

This might be a poor example, but lets say an error was found in a computation in a library, for example a rounding error or something, in that case, more often than not, the community will rather live with the known error and have consistency instead.