john_fushi

I knew someone who worked at refund at home depot for a while. Heard official policy was to refund anyone if they argued enough.

She told me stories like someone coming in with a 3 year old, completely ripped shower curtain and getting a refund.

So to be honest, I'd have no problem believing that they'd refund cash old flowers at the end of the year.

I guess it has to be implicitly added as soon as we speak about changing the world. At some level everything change the world and then the expression loses its meaning.

It's shunned in most languages because it's often the only way to do things to offer. OOP is really appropriate in some circumstances but it's not the ultimate paradigm that solves all your problems. Javascript offers some facilities that makes it more polyvalent.

Disclaimer : I'm not actually a big fan of javascript.

She wasn't feeling her usual self and I had to ask explicitely(Do you consider suicide?). For someone who is just feeling down and not suicidal the question might be a bit of a shock, but in the end you are showing that you care and that you are present if things go really bad.

And then again, pretty much everyone knows the existence of suicide. If asking the question and trying to help drives someone to action, chances are something else would have.

I dealt recently with a friend who was suicidal. Since I didn't know what to do I called Suicide Action to ask how to deal correctly with the situation and get some pointers on dos and donts.

Basically you WANT to talk explicitely about suicide. From what the lady on the phone said, most of the time the suicidal person wants to talk about it.

I think the issue is that you compare the 10x programmers to the average programmer. The original source say that you can see an order of magnitude of difference between a good and a poor programmer. Haven't you ever done in a week what a poor programmer took a month to (poorly) do?

"Related, it is remarkable how we developers routinely cite Knuth's advice about premature optimization to justify our decision when the shoe fits, and then turn around and flatly ignore the advice when it doesn't fit."

It is especially bad when people uses Knuth's advice to forgo the conception part where you think about what technologies you will use and why.

It is really sad that texting while driving is enough of a problematic to require such sensibilisation. If you don't understand the implications of diverting your attention to this point while driving, you shouldn't have the right to drive. And texting seems to divert enought attention that some people died walking in between the subway`s wagons.

I did not initially see the 'intro' in the title and it took me a while to understand why the author put so much energy on this (relatively) questionable aspect of c++.

On the article itself, I don't believe anyone sincerely consider C++ to be a good introductory language. It is dragged by a lot of low-level concerns which are only a dead-weight for a beginner. At this point of a programming cursus, the focus should be on understanding algorithms and low level details that can be useful in other contexts only serves to trip students.

As for the higher level of C++, such as everything object oriented, I believe it becomes and additional load on the understanding of the language(why are Strings initialized this way? How come I can call a function from a data type with the dot-notation, but functions I define can only be called by themselves?)

I find it to be also weird that String::length returns a type_t. The way I understood this type was that it represented a memory size. When we call length, we want the number of characters, independantly of the character size under the hood.

I`ve had the opportunity to use lua to program the state machine of a protocol and I must admit I was really blown away by the performance.

I often see the 'honesty' argument when people talk about the programmer community being mean. The way I see it, most of the time there is no more honesty than anywhere else. People jump on some hate bandwagon whether it is bullshit or not. Or sometimes, there is just some fad going on and everyone jump on the love train where critical thinking is met with a defensive/reactionary attitude.

I'm not sure I understand your last point. Do you desire for compilers to deduce the underlying type from the name of the variable or a type system that would let you create subtypes to give them additional contextual informations that the compiler would then use to enforce integrity?

lung necrosis?

"I don't think it's nonsense. The things that are wrong with a $1000 minimum wage are the same things that are wrong with a $10 minimum wage. They're just happening to different people"

You don't seem to consider elasticity. Basically, the main argument of the proponents of a higher minimum wage is that the hiring capacity is elastic enough that a raise in minimal wage's benefits far outweigh the resulting loss of jobs.

Saying that raising the minimal wage to 10$ show the same problems than raising it to 1000$ is wrong in that it considers that, at best, the elasticity of the hiring capacity equals 1. However, we can expect it to be false if we consider that the minimal wage has, in effect, went down in the recent years and that it did not result in a hiring frenzy.

He probably did not express himself correctly. Good vodka is supposed to have a flavor as neutral as possible.

Depending on where you live the mailman can even be fired or sued.

This is superficial and I probably shouldn't answer to this but anyways : Dawson is, in fact, an english college.

This story is somewhat complex, and lacks information on many aspects. I've made a kind of TLDR of what happened and added my thoughts. I've also cross compared the informations given in the article with those available on dawson's college web page and Skytech's omnivox.

[he was] working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account [.] -> Did he have authorisation? -> From who did he have authorisation? -> Omnivox does not seem to have a public API.

“I saw a flaw which left the personal information of thousands of students, including myself, vulnerable,” "I felt I had a moral duty to bring it to the attention of the college and help to fix it, which I did. I could have easily hidden my identity behind a proxy. I chose not to because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.” -> Did he try to fix it, or only bring it to the attention of the college? -> Did he inform the college he tried/would try to fix the flaw? -> Did he try to fix the flaw after or before meeting with the college?

"Mr. Paradis congratulated Mr. Al-Khabaz and colleague Ovidiu Mija for their work and promised that he and Skytech, the makers of Omnivox, would fix the problem immediately" -> Mr. Paradis is Dawson's Director of Information Services and Technology -> I precise only because it is not clear from the article if he works at the college or at Skytech

"Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix" "to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected" -> Did they use acunetix the first time? -> If yes, did the college know? Did skytech noticed? -> Otherwise, why? They found the flaw without acunetix

"Taza explained that he was quite pleased with the work the two students did identifying problems, but the testing software Mr. Al-Khabaz ran to verify the system was fixed crossed a line."

The administration of Dawson College clearly saw things differently, proceeding to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz for a “serious professional conduct issue.

Following this meeting, the fifteen professors in the computer science department were asked to vote on whether to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz, and fourteen voted in favour. Mr. Al-Khabaz argues that the process was flawed because he was never given a chance to explain his side of the story to the faculty -> Was there other incidents that could have influenced the judgment? -> College rarely want to expel students who ace all their courses. Especially in CS with the high rate of failure.

-> According to the college : The process which leads to expulsion includes a step in which a student is issued an advisory to cease and desist the activities for which he or she is being sanctioned

-> This, along with the "He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs" tend to indicate he probably ran the test multiple times. Or, the first time he foud the flaw, skytech took him for an attacked and the college warned him to stop developpement on his application. This would indicate that he had no authorisation in doing so.