hythloday

Due to phonetic shifts in the programming language community, we now say that barbarians are people who say "var var var".

It's the usage that originated with Lewis H. Morgan. Engels used it in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which Wikipedia has a good summary of:

> Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family

Even closer to home is the England/Portugal alliance, which started in 1373 and has run continuously since then.

> I can only assume that someone else was the talent at Bullfrog and Lionhead.

You should look into the career of the Carter brothers (Simon and Dene).

We've thought exactly the same in the past about depression, homosexuality, unmarried mothers and outspoken women, but yes, maybe this time medicalizing something before we know much about it is the right answer and won't make us look like abhorrent barbarians to our grandchildren.

In the literature these are called Barnum Statements (after PT Barnum, of "there's one born every minute").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

I understood the /converse/ to be the hyponyms of x's hypernym that were not x.

So "spoon's" converse are forks, knives, maybe chopsticks, etc.

Data Engineer at Thread (YC '12) here.

We're a relatively small team so it's nothing terribly sophisticated - Spark jobs prep log data for a nightly model training, done with sklearn - the model is just a python pickle that get loaded into our ranking system, Thimble. All done on EC2.

We also have a real-time pipeline (Bazalgette) that pulls events off a Kinesis stream and turns them into features, saved to Redis.

We're hiring a software engineer (in London) at the moment so if this sounds like the kind of tech you'd be interested in working alongside, drop me an email (in my profile) or look at https://thread.com/jobs

I don't think that you literally mean literally, but an obvious difference between slavery in the United States and conscription in the United States that you can avoid the latter by permanently renouncing your citizenship.

Not a lawyer, but I imagine they have not ability to exercise the fifth amendment as it's not self-incrimination, and I believe only natural persons (i.e. not corporations) are protected by it.

You may enjoy knowing that the singular of criteria is criterion (Greek, not Latin). A criterium is a bike race, from the same root: a κριτήριον is a decision, with the same nuance of meaning as English judg(e)ment.

Neither online nor free, but the Cambridge Latin courses are justly acclaimed as classics in the Classics.

If your business model relies on you paying people less than a minimum wage, there's no particular reason that a society who's decided that's a bad idea should allow you to limit your liability to losses.

And all people on zero-hours contracts love that and all children who worked in factories were violently against being sent to school.

Not sure if you're aware but iterm2 (v3) has tmux support so you can have the benefits of both.

I would suggest that pattern matching over ADTs is what has subsumed the visitor pattern.

In the UK, both The Co-operative and John Lewis companies are cooperatives and account for over 10% of the supermarket industry. Various building societies are very similar, and the largest has 10-20% of the banking market (depending on how you measure it).

> I just mean it is silly.

What's your point in bringing up combinatorics then?

> Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations.

Imagine using the most trivial kind of UI (literally a LRU cache would do the job) so that emoji you use more often are presented first. In fact, you don't even need to imagine, because this is how they already work on Android.

I have to wonder why you are dedicating so much energy to problematizing uses of emoji that you disapprove of without really seeming to know much of them. If they don't work for you maybe just don't use them?

I'm going to leave this link in the rather forlorn hope that something about it might take root:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...

I really wonder about the combination of ignorance of Unicode, stick-in-the-mud attitude to diversity and appetite for accidental irony that makes someone write a long paragraph (570 characters - that's at least 10^170 combinations of characters - basically impossible to store) about how it's impossible in 2016 to apply combining characters to emoji (which is how the diverse emoji are already implemented).

> up to the time when statistical significance is achieved. You generally then stop the test

Just a note, don't literally do this:

http://conversionxl.com/statistical-significance-does-not-eq...

That's also the definition of "getting better".

I think by CG you mean computer graphics? Cg was nVidia's shader language that compiled to HLSL or GLSL. Writing shaders is sometimes serious business but more often than not it's just as drudgey as writing CRUD pages.

Twitter, now, sells advertising, which is 90% of its revenue. While it was VC-funded, which is really what you should be comparing it to as it's the prevalent stage of an startup, it raised money from VC funds by hitting non-contractual milestones in terms of MAU/DAU increases. I don't think that's particularly different to the milestone model that's prevalent in games - a third party pours money incrementally into the development of a product contingent on the mutually agreeable evolution of the product.

Unless you're in the habit of delivering RC-quality milestones (which is afaik unheard of in AAA development), the marginal value of a milestone is negative right up until the last one.

If you're comparing them to VC-funded startups, games studios run on negative profit margins until the game is released!

And yet research tells us that two fathers raise children who are as well adapted in every way as ones raised by a father and a mother, and that two mothers raise children who're better adapted.

(I find it slightly hilarious that you think that children had only two raisers In The Ancestral Environment.)

Something about your last paragraph rubbed me the wrong way. Sorry.

> about 10X the competition

Steam added 1500 games in the first 7 months of 2015. Crunchbase had over 8000 investments in 2015. So I don't think that's true, even accounting for a Christmas peak.

> juggling massive game assets

Lots of data goes into games, lots of data comes out of websites. The difference to my eyes is that the industry has multiple, principled, well-understood frameworks to deal with the data problem and the games industry has...what? Maybe the state of the art has moved on in the last 5 years but when I left it was all "well it's just a DAG, how hard can it be to write a tool to recursively build it".

> a fraction of the budget, finance, and exit options

Being willing to work for less and with fewer resources is not a sign of good engineering practice. I don't know if I'd say it's the opposite but it's at best irrelevant.

> a tough frame rate budget

Not very different to needing to meet tough latency/error rate SLAs, except instead of failing TRC (or getting your exec producer to stare down MSFT/Sony), you'll just go broke. Oh, and you don't know what the SLA is, ever, so it's a continuous process of tradeoff.

> all issues GPU-ish (when was the last time you wrote a shader, Mr. Website Developer?)

Ignoring that some "website developers" (many of whom are not "Mr" - something else that the games industry does not do well at) do write shaders in the form of GPGPU optimization of ML tasks, obviously tasks differ. Let's not pretend that banging out something in Cg is PhD-level shit. It's not harder than writing a Spark job, for sure.

> having people with a huge range of technical skills requiring direct access to the source/asset repo.

You have Mr. Blow upthread sneering at Twitter for employing 4000 people to build something "trivial" but you think that each of those people have identical programming chops in every bit of the code they touch? If there's a single thing that argues against your idea it's this - the rest of the industry has become pretty good at modularizing areas of the business and auditing changes to it with code review, build/asset/deployment tagging etc. The last games company I worked at, someone stayed at the office until 5am before going on holiday for a week and sent an email that effectively said "I've rewritten quite a bit of the engine, you'll probably need to fix the build because I didn't test anything, see you in a fortnight". People gasp when gmail/twitter/facebook is down for half an hour but I've worked in places where there _wasn't even a canonical build_ that could be broken.

I was in the games industry from 1999 to 2012 (and then left to go to Twitter!) and I think his friend is absolutely right, the games industry shoots itself in the foot repeatedly by believing that it's a special snowflake full of "hard problems" that no-one else tackles and continually (and badly) tries to reinvent the wheel. The universal culture of deathmarches and the denigration of mainstream software engineering and project management techniques are not in any way coincidental.

(I loved the Witness, btw.)

TL;DR (I don't blame you, it's not that funny):

  Have you already established a language for your project or team?
    Yes:  Keep using that fucking language. Unless you can't accomplish your goals with your current language, you're setting back progress by starting with a new language.
    No: Are you building a mobile app?
      Yes: Are you building for Android, iOS, or both?
        Android: Looks like you're using fucking Java. Hybrid apps suck.
        iOS: Use fucking Swift. Hybrid apps suck.
        Both: Time to learn fucking Java and Swift. Hybrid apps suck, so your dumb ass needs to learn both.
      No: What the fuck are you building?
        Web app/Networked application: Is it a client-side app?
          Yes: Looks like you're stuck with fucking JavaScript you poor bastard.
          No: Are you working for an established enterprise or a startup?
            Enterprise: Just use fucking Java. No one ever got fired for choosing Java.
            Startup: Do you give a shit about concurrency?
              Yes: Do you know why you give a shit about concurrency?
                Yes: Are you into functional programming?
                  Yes: Do you need to use the Java Virtual Machine for some fucking reason?
                    Yes: Use fucking Clojure
                    No: Use fucking Rust or Elixir. I've got you this far, choose whichever one doesn't look like shit to you.
                  No: Use fucking Go.
                Not really: I didn't think so you asshole. Just use Ruby - probably with Rails - and get the fuck out of my office.
              No: Do you need static types?
                Yes: Use fucking Dart
                No: Do you want only one language in your codebase?
                  Yes: You're stuck with fucking JavaScript, but you already knew that
                  I don't care: Are you already familiar with at least one programming language?
                    Yes: Are you nostalgic for the web of the early 2000s?
                      Yes: You should probably stick with fucking PHP
                      No: Use fucking Ruby
                    No: Use fucking Python. It's easy to learn and very powerful.
        Desktop app: How fucking lazy are you?
          Really lazy: Damn it. Just use fucking Visual Basic. I hope you're proud of yourself.
          Sort of lazy: Just use fucking Java.
          I'll sleep when I die: Do it properly in some fucking dialect of C

Well, this works the other way around too, right? If you invite, or accept applications from, someone who is primarily noted for {bar}, then whatever your name, official agenda, or spokespeople say, you are now hosting a conference tolerant or supportive of {bar}.

You seem to be making a declaration that acts are inherently political, and I'm all for that. It's just that the standard works both ways.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point you're making with "computer says no".

> Genetic algorithms have designed circuitry that we failed to even understand at first but that did work.

This is an excellent example of what I think of as not machine intelligence. If humans can't understand it then it's something entirely different that we need a different word for - an "artefact", perhaps. Meaningfully contributing to the state of the art of human knowledge requires being built upon. If these genetic algorithms can explain how they can be incorporated into the design process by humans, that's intelligence. If they are similar to being able to evolve a mantis shrimp by fiddling with DNA, that is marvellous but not what I would regard as intelligence.

We apply the same standard to human intelligence: someone who can multiply numbers very fast but not explain how they can do it is a savant; someone who can discover and teach other people a faster way of multiplication is intelligent.