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route66on Delete your code

"It worked different three months ago...". But I agree that this is no reason to gave to wade through commented out sections[1] but to simply use the powers of <vcs-of-choice> diff.

[1] Including if(0){} abominations

route66on Signs you might be in "Survival Mode"

I definitely recognize these patterns from non-startups. Ingredients: demanding customers, company led by former developers who still avoid all non-coding related improvements as enterprisy. Often it is simply the Peter Principle at work, duct-tape programming led you here, but not further.

route66on Clojure web security is worse than you think

Another important thing he points at is to not write you own incarnation of every library you find lacking but provide patches/support/whatever to existing ones. While it might help your CV to have just another template library (which will inevitably be lacking again) on github, the ecosystem profits more from a few well defined and long-term maintained choices.

route66on Clojure web security is worse than you think

I would want to turn the question around and (genuinely, not rhetorically) ask: which ecosystems right now do have a good security baseline? Am I wrong when I guess Java/.Net/Ruby and possibly more recent PHP frameworks?

route66on Ruby Gem Configuration Patterns

In this case you are probably right. The solution with separate configuration shines though, when you have many values to configure (notwithstanding keyword args). But, and that is my main takeaway, TDD does apparently (and not surprisingly) not show the way to one or the other solution. On the contrary: the solution was already given in advance and the TDD part was more or less toying around with the moving parts of the solution.

route66on What Happens to Older Developers?

So you see how difficult it is to please armchair psychologists: leaving out the first person pronoun from sentences is also considered bad style by some (with the suggested pseudo objectivity). Others conclude even that the person has no self esteem etc etc.

A resume is about the person presenting him/herself, isn't it?

route66on The truth is out: money is just an IOU

The BoE document linked in the text: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte... ("Money creation in the modern economy")

route66on The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee

I am probably not smart, maybe not intellectual but most definitely not a lady.

As for the industry: seemingly the industry thinks that showing ass and tits on a booth is worth it. That alone says enough. It is not about the ones who are earning their money there but the ones who think that their industry needs that. No discussion of "choice" needed.

route66on The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee

> I think nobody is to blame here

An industry who employs women as booth babes, apparently because staring at a booth babe sells tech better? Stinks.

route66on Burnout

Considering the first half: your are playing their game, isn't it? (something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEv1L4MCHj8)

route66on Fucking Shell Scripts

I think it's the chinese whisper effect applied to http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html [0] and as such more cult than information. As witnessed by the discussion around here.

[0] ("Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.")

route66on Why Node.js is becoming the go-to technology

Indeed. That fluff article reminds me of the .NET spam around 2005. Pointing out three times that "the best developers...like to use new technologies": so, they leave you with a pile of smelling javascript over two years when they are heading for <fill in>. Are they the best by the way? or does it feel like being the best when you can finally add two numbers in a new language? Oh, and that "developer hapiness" argument again. Then: "composed from modules, piped together" contrasted with "traditional monolithic applications". So the writer (or the node developers he represents) was/were unable writing composable code in the other languages they know? (must be a lot, see above) Just wait until their piped modules look like this: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/image/brazil21.jpg

rant over

route66on Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]

If your code turns into 30 one-liners with 30! unforeseen possible calling combinations thereby exposing an API of irrelevant auxiliary functions to the outside world? Yes.

route66on Alleged Mt.Gox code leaked on IRC node by Russian Hacker

It's less about the transactions but the money.

    >> 3 * 1005.01
    => 3015.0299999999997

This might get truncated to 3015.02 and might

    >> 3 * 1005.01 * 10000
    => 30150299.999999996

turn into a real loss.

route66on How I stay calm, by people with very stressful jobs

Not from an outside view I would say. But when we are talking about the subjective perception of stress, it might as well be that the stress as perceived by the diver or the A&E consultant is not proportionally higher.

route66on GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.

So, if you have to hide something, show your private parts. Can we conclude this?

route66on The French way of cancer treatment

Isn't it a much simpler explanation that healthcare should never be a free market as one of it's participants, the "patient" is not participating voluntarily?

(This is not a direct response to your post, but I place it here as you put a market argument upfront)

route66on Plan 9 released under GPLv2

You mean, like the Linux kernel with it's GPLv2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright.2C_trademark.2C...)

route66on On Programming Communities

When I search for "Scala" the programming language in that interface, I still get the majority of the results from Italy, specifically the region of Milan (and the Teatro alla Scala). Might be, because "making a program" is an activity in music too, and google is unable to filter that?

route66on Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

Don't worry, (US) corporations will be able to sue (EU) states soon when they don't like their laws [1] . Line of argumentation: "Europe has an unreasonably high standard [in it's protective laws], and not one based on science" [2]

[1] http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-eu-us-trade-talks/liti...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcoue-mlQxw&t=58

route66on After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him

See here the word "scientific" used by a politician to prepare for some hardball during the ongoing TTIP negotiations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcoue-mlQxw&t=56

Multinationals will be able to sue countries for their business obstructing laws concerning environmental legislation etc., thereby conveniently bypassing democratic process.

route66on Evolution of words frequencies in porn

To speak of evolution when your time frame is 2008-2012 is somewhat far fetched. But I believe I see a reassuring trend here: http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=erlang%2C+clojure%2C+Ada%...

route66on Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'

> ... how can everything be relative when there's an absolute maximum velocity?

The observations leading to relativity theory put this question differently: Apparently the speed of light is constant, no matter how fast it's origin moves [1] : so we have to interpret our measurements relative to the speed of the observer. I still find Einstein's explanation the most readable [2]. He stays close to the geometrical description of reference frames and avoids the pictorial freedom known from monad tutorials...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80 %93Morley_experiment

[2] http://www.bartleby.com/173/5.html

route66on “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

> police everywhere can now just record the phone numbers

I remember that the dutch police some years ago already used so called "sms-bombs" to contact mobile phone subscribers that were around a crime scene months before.

It is simply inherent in the technology. You wear a mobile phone? (not even smart) So you are traceable with all consequences.

The solution? In any case not technical in nature. We will see.

route66on The effect of today’s technology on tomorrow’s jobs

> then I have to look elsewhere

Where, exactly, in a world of reduced job opportunities?

> ... side benefits ...... workout midday..., , ...walk in the park ...

For the people in question these pastimes are probably as realistic as having a Rhino shooting in Namibia.

> ... A portion...

You make it seem like a beautiful win-win situation, like a well deserved 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 ... + 0.1 split. The current discussion revolves, among other things, around the question if it's more like 0.99 + 0.01 and if that is like it should be.

With a reasoning like yours, I always wonder if there is indeed some underlying substance to it, or if it's sheer hope and faith in some Austrian god?

route66on Sneak into tech through the back door: a hopelessly limited how-to

Stolen from a thread around the corner: Scott Adams on "goals":

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...

route66on $4 toast: Why the tech industry is ruining San Francisco

Opera is a weird thing and just a status symbol? You deserve to pay $30 for your coffee! But maybe it's the cultural divide between <fill in yourself>

route66on At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything

Would there be a bigger picture, showing us, how these behaviour comes into being? How it could be addressed or prevented in other ways? "Ingrained" seems to indicated, that you feel (yes, it's an emotion , not an established fact) there is no help anyway, so lets get rid of them. Society, after all, does not exists. It's you or them?

In the light of the recent complaints on this blog about homeless people in SF: maybe there is a completely surprising "disruption" lurking, if you do not address this subject with a "we" mindset.

route66on Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch

Next to that, performers of early music of non-western music experience no advantage from pp. Tunings are relative to other central tones, or tuning does not happen in tempered system currently in use.

route66on What Surveillance Valley knows about you

So, criticizing that a company collects and indexes sensitive medical data of individuals without insight in what the are producing and selling is "intellectually dishonest" when we single out the fact that they are selling rape victim data collections?

Just explaining how things might have come to be, as you do in this strawman exercise, doesn't make it acceptable, or does it?