OtterCoder

California and New England are so divorced from the concerns and ethos of the 'flyover' states that they may as well be on another planet. You may not think of yourself as elitist, but from the perspective of a Midwesterner, you almost certainly are.

I can readily agree with this approach. My handwriting is... suitable for a doctor at best, so a word processor is pretty important to me when it comes down to implementation, but I've had so many problems just melt away in the face of a pencil and a good graph or summary.

Seconded. I've chugged an energy drink on the job once, and immediately regretted it. So many people forget that programming is more about thinking than typing, and refuse to let themselves just sit (or nap) and think.

Fascism, for the people who shape it as such, will be pushed forward by some of the kinds of people the article mentions. However, Germany was and is and always will be peopled by mostly reasonable, kind, stout folks, because most people everywhere are reasonable, kind, and stout.

Even the cream of a country can be goaded and led and pushed into fascism, as the tide sweeps across a frightened or depressed people. The soldiers of Germany had to be shown the horrors and crimes of their superiors in gory detail, and still they had to be marshaled by strict speech laws to prevent the resurrection of a horror that largely benefitted the masses.

I feel like there is much more of propaganda than insight in this piece. For one, because it looks specifically at Nazi-ism, and collaboration, rather than at fascism from the home front.

Secondly, it reeks of 'The good old boy' and the idea that a good man could never be deceived. It promotes a sense that, if you are simply American enough, you can escape the feverish grip of nationalism or public panic.

I don't think the wild west will be any friendlier to small inventors than the current techno-dystopia. At least at the moment companies are required to toss a coin at prior art occasionally.

Maybe we should have a law that allows patent infringement in the case of someone being able but unwilling to bring a product to market?

There are probably too many potential loopholes in that law though. There have been cases in publishing where a malicious publisher buys the rights to publish a book, promising a minimum run of the book, and then setting the price of the book prohibitively high, effectively censoring the title.

Please don't use w3schools. Its information is unreliable at best. The closest thing out there to a user's manual for the modern web is https://developer.mozilla.org

It's possibly the only reference you need for browser compatible JavaScript.

And the cost of plumbing and electrifying that land would be astronomical. Public works have a network effect.

Monads are too general though. Saying 'try monads' to solve a problem is like telling someone, 'try vowels' when they're trying pronounce a word.

I hate conversations when I'm shopping. If a chipper salesperson walks over and starts chatting me up or making small talk, I will immediately turn around and walk out, and I'm an extrovert. I want to look at price, price per unit/spec, hold the thing if quality is relevant, then make a purchase. The less you pitch to me, the more likely I'll buy.

Trim until the idea to be conveyed disappears. Then ctrl-z once.

As an Oregonian, putting together the pieces, I'd guess she was in the field turning over cow patties looking for psychedelic mushrooms, a common but illegal hobby in that part of the world. Cow patty had flies and parasites, she touched her face, we all suffer this horrifying news cycle. The end.

I am frankly blown away that you feel persecuted for liberal opinions online. We must both go to the wrong fora for our ideologies.

You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism. Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.

> But given the choice between a developer who communicates clearly in code and knows it and one who either needs or believes he needs comments I'll choose the first.

This really just reads to me like you're selecting for hubris over humility, which is not likely to get good results over the long term. Give me a coder who doubts his code any day, over someone overconfident.

Scientist: Under extremely low-energy, highly controlled conditions, photons can be made to act in a way that strongly suggests some sort of bond or attraction has been created between them.

"Journalist": So, photons did something, that's like, light, right? Lightsabers! By Jove, you've done it!

What utter tripe.

I can faintly understand the usefulness of this in a browser context, but why would you ever run APL over node... Very cool learning project though.

I think you have a bit of a bias coming from Javaland. Java code is incredibly verbose for the sake of allowing the developer a thousand places to write self documenting code. It's a slog to write, but easier to read, by far.

In functional languages, a single filter-map-fold can accomplish what might take half a dozen classes in Java. In those circumstances, a line or two of comments explaining the rough idea of what's happening is essential. You might argue that it's a regression to the bad-old-days of obtuse C, but the power of the paradigm more than makes up for the extra need of documentation.

Also, would you penalize a developer for commenting cleanly written code? No attempt to communicate clearly should ever be discouraged, especially in a discipline so rife with miscommunication as ours.

Radiation might be a concern. It could possibly embrittle the paper over time.

I've done both as well, and while engineering does require real and serious thought, the traditions, literature, and science behind what you're doing is a trillion miles ahead of where programming is.

To put it in perspective, programming has barely had its Archimedes and its Da Vinci by this point. Best practices are a joke, and are usually based around superstition, personality cults, and faith instead of actual empiricism. Standardization is moving backwards, and computer 'scientists' rarely solve the problems software 'engineers' actually have.

It's a mess. Engineering can fall back on the basics, but programmers, at the end of the day, are mostly relying on instinct.

Edit: I'm not saying programmers are smarter or better. The opposite, in fact. The mistakes and oversights we get away with would likely get a real engineer arrested.

Yep. Turns out you can write better code faster when you aren't drooling on your keyboard or buzzed on fifteen espressos.

The problems come when people compare real engineering work with programming. I studied mechanical engineering. Real engineering is a very, very old art, and 99% of what you do is plugging numbers and adding margins, and physical constraints mostly dictate what you can do. Programming is mostly navigating blind in an infinite sea of possibility, and the only constraints are time and space. It's much more by-feel than real engineering, and I expect it to be that way for another half-millennium at least.

All that is to say, you can push a real engineer harder and get ok results still. A programmer will just die under the whip.

Reading this, I feel like many "continuous delivery" frameworks miss the mark. You don't need to have a powerful, complex server set up just for expediting as-fast-as-robotically-possible releases to your customers, because that's burden and investment you don't need to start with. All you need to do is make small version changes and do as little as possible to make it live.

I disagree. Programming, however we try to deceive ourselves, is not engineering. Too many things in our craft are unknown, untested, and a matter of instinct and aesthetic. We are blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, blending knowledge and art to produce tools and furniture for the use of others.

Sometimes the artistry is only visible in the fit and workings of the inner cogs, but it is there, and it is, in an infinite space of equivalent programs, an emotional, unobjective stab, a crude sketch, at some platonic truth that will always be outside of our reach.

Don't forget lime juice!

This is the first real potential application I've ever seen for connected appliances.

Elon Musk's livelihood doesn't actually depend on anything anymore. That's what being rich means.

That said, I get your point, but I also think separated housing is necessary for my sanity.

The one part of the spec that gives me pause is the fact that dropped memory isn't cleared. That sort of behavior has been the cause of so many network exploits. Is it worth worrying about here?

... I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. That's the first tank incident I referenced, and that wasn't a civilian tank in the first place.

Actually, I believe that there is a better case for civilian ownership of tanks, ordinance, and heavy/automatic weaponry than there is for handguns. According to a study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 86% of gun crimes involved a handgun, even though there are roughly equal numbers of rifles, handguns, and shotguns in the US.

Meanwhile, there's a tanker militia not far from where I live that practices regularly, and doesn't really bother anyone.

I'm fairly certain that there have been no tank related homicides in living memory, and the only two tank related crimes I can find news reports of involve a tank being taken from an army base for a joyride, and Killdozer, which injured no one (discounting the operator committing suicide), and was home-made anyways.

The thing about crime is that criminals instinctively want to hide what they're doing. Handguns are about a million times easier to hide than a rifle, or even a sawn-off shotgun. Having this bulky, visible weapon hanging off of your back is an automatic deterrent to crime.