julie1

A branch of physics used to be taught a long time ago called "numerical analysis" to deal with this issue.

We even used to be careful about the difference between 'precise and exact'.

Pi = acos(0) is absolutely exact. But computer don't know about symbolic calculus. So to put the value in a register we used tricks.

Pi as a the converging value at the infinite of the Taylor development is awesome. But computer don't know about infinite.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971 is precise.... it has a lot of digit and people loves that.

In ana num 3.15159 +- 0.00001 is exact. It bounds your result. Hence you can estimate your error and its propagation.

Because we thought humans were smart we thought that 3.14159 would be so meaningful people would understand that a constant should be considered to be exact with the implicit meaning that 9 was the last significant digit and people would be wise to use upper and lower bounds to estimates their results.

Then Computer Science was taught in university.

People not understanding why they had to study math and physics to simply program 2 + 2 and thought, stop bothering us. We just compute TVA we don't send a rocket to mars. Why learn boring math (integration, derivation, Newton's methods for approximation, Taylos's development, Cauchy Suites, condition of converging Suites, Integration in the complex field to compute generalized integrals, simplex, LU/RU matrices ....)

Yes people loves recurrence. They cannot apply the reasoning to simple maths series.

And that's how we have funny stuff like a lot of coder not understanding why :

   1.198 * 10.10
   12.099799999999998

Yes ... why are computers' maths so odd. What can we do about it?

Having a look at HP Saturn opcode makes you wonder if the lack of solution is because it does not exists or because people forgot. http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=1693

Fuzzy logic is back again? It used to make the headlines in the 90s for being the next revolution in industrial control (of furnaces).

I use rice cookers since 35 years (I am 43) I don't care about brown rice or whatever the fuzzy logic. I just adapt according to my own experience.

But I guess people don't want to have experience any more and prefer to be assisted as a hero of Wall-e?

Manipulating history belongs to one of the dark ages secret of "everlasting cookies" aka the zombie cookies you can't kill. Navigation history was globally accessible from any DOM elements when I was working in ad industry (2013).

http://samy.pl/evercookie/

Some of these have been fixed, some not.

it does to.

It is also a prophylactic measure that is efficient. And yes, I missed the non ads dynamic contents that could also be unsafe. Then I would get paranoid with thousands sloc of JS included of minified code per project build with complex build chains. Knowing that ff extensions are in JS, I should purely stop using JS with my reasoning.

But as pointed out it results on some websites to serve degraded contents.

So it makes you choose between full access of web content, or safe access to a smaller part of the web.

Well, concerned websites could choose static assets based only ads.

Static ads bring less revenues than dynamic ads per exposure thus less $ / kb loaded. That's all.

But does the ads industry fairly give them enough information to make a rational choice?

Do you tell your kins/friends about your safety concerns and advise them to do the same? Else, why not?

Cool having 50$ to live some weeks makes me and my wife healthy.

Poverty rox.

So why do stats about life expectancy says the opposite? Especially in countries where people have even to fast more than I?

Easy, and this code helps creating the computer that will run your code. It is a 0th order class language.

  library IEEE;
  use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_1164.ALL;

  entity and_or_top is
      Port ( INA1 : in  STD_LOGIC;    -- AND gate input
             INA2 : in  STD_LOGIC;    -- AND gate input
             OA   : out STD_LOGIC;    -- AND gate output
  end and_or_top;

  architecture Behavioral of and_or_top is
  begin
      OA <= INA1 and INA2;    -- 2 input AND gate
  end Behavioral;

My little pinkie tells me you are a fellow more junior coder and that you are trying to deal with a situation that is not in your full authority (management or HR). I guess you have been talking of it as a team and are trying to bypass the hierarchy because you expect them to potentially fire him. You may be alone thinking of actually doing more than talking about it between yourselves.

This is nice. You seem to care. That is a good point.

Talk to him and listen to him. Nicely, as a friend and ask him how he feels about it. The alcohol is there to alleviate a big pain. The pain will be worse if he tries to stop violently. Violent withdrawal put your body in bad state anyway. He may have tried and experienced it first hand and may be scared to try again. If he does share his experience, it means he has made a lot of work on himself already.

You can propose him attending one AA meeting (together or not). It is a nice beginning because they don't guilt people and they actually know what they talk about.

They will probably confirm HN is not the right place to ask for help, and that my advice were a tad wrong.

AA seems to work for some people. It does not fit others.

If it fails, well, maybe it will still help him begin to do the second step. There are other solutions.

I don't know your proximity. Just don't over-invest yourself and accept you might fail.

Helping him for the first step and talking to him is way more than most people do. So if you fail, don't guilt yourself.

And set top box that may have another version of JS.

Or the "javascript" used in Qt ... or any new appliance/software that wants to provide a common accessible language for their "events" and choose a JS that is patched to support stuff like hardware functions.

I have been using these kinds of FrankeinJS in the past.

People love it.

Why don't we change where the clutch, the break and the acceleration pedals are from time to time on cars? Just for fun.

Why don't we switch riding right side and left side of the road? Every once in a while? Or the shape and colours of traffic lights?

Why do piano keyboards keep the same boring interface since decades (7 whites 5 black keys)?

Why do we have books with always the same size and boring indexes, table of matters and introductions?

Why don't we change VAT tax forms every months?

Oh I know, because changes are costly and not needed.

Someone is rediscovering literate programming where the code is so meaningful it serves as documentation of itself.

I vote for a troll disguising a boring scheme tutorial in a satire.

But it is very metaphysical à la Artistote or Giodarno Bruno ... I would say like almost any stuff written by the functional programming adepts. I am not sure if FP is mathematics or philosophy sometimes. I like them like some weird religious monks producing free beers. I drink the beer, I avoid the church.

But I would say that even if I do not like scheme, I value meaningful code too.

I guess markdown is nice for unstructured text.

When you think you can learn a job (technical writer) by doing it bad rather than not doing it at all, you just take bad habits.

Serious technical documentation are structured. Pictures have captions, graphs have legends... It is cumbersome, it requires more data but that is the price to communicate (wait for it) INFORMATION to other humans.

Yes, writing structured documentation that can be easily used is part of what information technologies are. Structuring information from data.

Information is still analogic at the end and rst is just a typesetting chain designed for a domain specific kind of documents called technical documentation.

I am totally biased. I love readthedocs, I love POD, man pages, ISO documentations, IETF RFC, ASM papers, all kind of scientific papers, useful instructions that can help me do my job faster by following well known practices to be consistently readable without strain. And rst for this level of requirement is less a PITA than doing it conscientiously by hand or with markdown.

But I agree, I totally love the artistic freedom of markdown for writings too. But in a Museum, or as grafitis.

We talk about documentations right? Not art? So the title is accurate.

Well, read the source of jquery. You will see fixes for "old new features" of FF that broke applications in the past.

Given the way mozilla teams are still working I guess it can still happen.

EDIT and add the memory leaks and the change of performance that happens from time to time in new releases.

well javascript is evolving at a fast pace.

Wheat still grow on a seasonal base. Tourism is still yearly based. A car will last you years. telco CPE are lasting for years. Bank terminals are for years. Robots in factories last decades. Peacemakers are intended to last ages. Users do not really like to have their interface changed without any reasons to do simple tasks.

Browser ecosystem is just running amok in terms of speed diversity and complexity.

At the end, when we code it is for a business value. And for businesses web technologies are mostly expenses that grows faster and increase faster than economical growth. At one point this is condemning software business value in times of recession when people need to cut on costs to survive.

JS fast pace == a lot of manpower to keep application just up to date. It is a continuous growing bleed in the budget.

It is not the fatigue of the coder or sysadmins one should fear. But the fatigue of the business customers bored to pay for diminishing returns. Individual customers may still follow. But losing business customers will happen first.

Plus like it or not, updating browsers is not always as easy as you think it is. We all know of these legacy application that requires to keep a certain browser, and of new application requiring different one and the complexity of handling all these browsers. I used to have 6 browsers to code and test.

This is killing the business of coding and there is no "magic library" that will change the seasonality of the activity and the need for companies to keep their costs in control.

Industry out of IT requires for boring stable LTS technologies. The opposite of the offer of modern IT.

When offer does not meet demands ... company fail.

If ever USA or Europa, India, China announce a recession in 2016 or 2017 there will be blood in the IT.

It is all about costs and prices and making benefits at the end.

Well the problem is you may not want your bank to gamble your money. And governments refused to separate financial activities of banks with their depots missions in most places. Leaving 98% of your actual money playing on markets on stuff you would not have wished to invest in the first place. Like the junk bonds and US mortage from 2007 that are still there in the bilans.

It is as if our arms are bent to deposit our money in less than trustable places without guarantees.

Are they trying to prevent banks from bankrupting or what?

You also may not want government to be able to seize your money like it was done in Malta or in Greece.

Banks are privately owned entities I do not trust. I have the right to not entrust my money to thieves and parasites without a minimum of security on my savings. Especially when they could bankrupt.

Wall streets tends to love what customers hate.

Like proprietary stuff, impossibility to repair your product, turning solid buys into rents with added services, people finding a way to pollute without paying (because batteries are not made of roses), bundling services, de facto monopolies... breaking regulated market (like car distribution) ...

I don't feel thrilled when wall street or any stock exchange is thrilled. Pretty much the opposite.

This site is so reductive and looking like crap it is annoying.

What about the liability? The moral rights? The second creation's right? The endorsement clause?

Picking up a license on a website that does not even point to any clear definition of license and why we need them is disinformation.

Even the FSF I love to criticize has a better page that is more informative and complete :

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

Of course it requires to read, but choosing a license is an important choice.

And proprietary licenses are fine if they fit your needs.

Should leibniz, keppler, Einstein, newton, flemming, jenner papers should have been free?

Oh they were. And it is thanks to flemming that people stopped dying in atrocious ways over the world from gangrene.

Should citizens be able to access state of the art research about how to prevent vascular disease, dietetic, chemical pollution, effects of fracking, urbanisms to help them make good choices when voting? I do think so.

Because no vote exists without enlighten choices.

Chosing without relevant information on future choice that will impact every one require citizens that can have a constructed opinion. And experts are doing a poor job at being right. (look at the financial regulations made by experts and the long lasting crisis since 2000).

So yes, papers should be free to support the exercise of democracy.

Simple IPv4 subnet network tool ?

I still think that FGPA should be thought in the perspective of building an ASIC. And that most ASIC should be thought like Keep It Simple Stupid device that have to handle state machine autonomously.

Encapsulation of the abstraction begins at the HW level.

I really don't like FSM handled by an external system.

Drivers.

The interface between the physical world and the digital world. They are the lenses of computers as much as its magic.

It is just a complex system leaving one of this basin of attraction to try to reach another one. (probably because of an evaluation of risk that deemed it).

And for a complex system transitions happens to be sensitive to the conditions and with quite a lot of impredictability.

AI cannot do smooth transitions because they lack the intuition of what smooth means, and that's how to win against them.

1) identify a basin of attraction(apparition of a bounded domain of evolution in a space phase) 2) set the AI in a well known basin by tricking it; 3) imbalance the AI by throwing garbage behaviour that kick him out of the basin in a random direction 4) let the human win in the chaos that ensues.

Of course it is better done with a software to help you. A real time spase phase analysor.

The point is like in a lot of domain, construction of an AI requires more energy than a software for sabotaging it.

But once you get the framework of thoughts to win against an AI you can get all the AI.

I sometime wonder if microchip/Soc wouldn't be better if we removed Wifi and USB kind of hardware support that are relying on enormous amount of (bloated) kernel code to perform magic.

Embedded system for having a real purpose of studying and experimentation would rather need a core HF radio transmitter/receiver instead of wifi and the abstract layer for modulation/demodulation digital/physical layer should better be handled in the user space.

USB could be replaced by other bus/hw link that have a simpler state machine and easier wire control. Ex: GPIB.

USB and Wifi have to much states required to function simply.

And seriously, just blitting operation (also usable in cryptography and matrix operations) should be enough to have a decent 2D CPU handling of graphics. Then, with an I2C bus you probably can pilot a chipset to just process the buffers at refresh time and either DAC or push them to a display.

The complexity in the design reflects in the complexity of the code needed to handle it.

People like my mother are losing an astounding amount of work because of poorly designed interfaces.

My mother that still has an economical activity is losing money with modern technologies. And no one is liable.

It is is the "user's fault". The keyboard chair bug.

If also so many people get fucked by the oldest trick on earth of executing arbitrary software by trusting an unknown source it is clearly an information problem.

Either the industry is unable to make the information clear, or the information presented is not adapted to human beings.

In both cases, given the number of victims and money lost do you really think that this industry considers itself liable? Users are treated guilty by default in the mind of the companies.

The PR of IT is that all the bugs from software is the fault of the users. It is denial.

We (software industry) are the root cause some people lose money and no one can sue us for this.

Because we impress them with our confidence. And they believe us.

PKI is a silver bullet.

The weakness of the chain are human beings. For the same reasons the young coders are still making SQL injections, people keep bad practices for security.

Our human brain cannot store too much stress and secrets. So every human make shortcuts.

They forgot to check public keys and identity during key signing parties or accept to put in their ring of trusts people refusing to justify their identities.

PKI à la PGP like bitcoin is weak to local majority attack.

And human are still the weak point. Just target the vulnerable to take down the ring of trust.

Information technology requires better education. Not more expertise. Just the basics.

you are confused.

Free in english means either 0$ or free as a speech. Free software is the later.

And Stallman contradicts you : making your free software sustainable by founding yourself is a must.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

So before shaming fellow free software coders about what we do and know better than you, RTFM.

Our workforce IS NOT FREE.

Ok, when it comes to hygienism, healthy food, the cult of Nature and of the perfect body, where bullying/shaming publicly the weaker was the right way to discuss a problem there is an historical precedent.

A regim loving all of this, and nice desgin/architecture and also going to the conclusion disabled people are a waste ... I don't say it to not win a Godwin point.

But really social networks don't bring the best out of Humanity.

The internet era of NNTP newsgroups, early web had some dark parts but it was more looking like an agora than the arena it has became.

Modern internet is becoming scary.

Okay, you can be super pro autonomous but the problem is not technical.

Who is liable in case of accident (financially and legally)?

The car (no legal existence), the algorithm (no legal existence) a developer doing a library that fails and has been used without is knowledge (nop), the developer integrating without control (nop), the scrum master who pushed a bad choice? the financial director for not caring about the cost of risks? The CTO .... no one is liable. Liability is diluted.

Who will pay when people will die?

And given VW dieselgate, RSA weakening of crypto, the actual world does not seems to support software engineers caring about their users or regulations.

Prescribing opium ... a trend that have not been seen in the world since victorian era in the UK.

Opium having the reputation to make people amorph losing their will to rebel.

The new trend is opioid are now cheap and not prescribed to the rich but the poor.

Religion used to the opium of the people they said, and now that opium is cheap, religion is not needed anymore to make people servile.

I love this new era of progress.

Tomorrow we make an application to help parents poor sell their kids body part on the internet for the cure of richer people?

I mean, let's try to make even more dystopic. We can do better. That is what progress is. Making system more efficient.