adamconroy

I think you just proved it is a real thing. Nobody but an addict could bothered posting such a well analysed comment on an obscure forum.

Correct. And because I can't have conversations on twitter I find it very tedious.

Weird. My opinion is that he is a fantastic teacher. I did his Stanford AI course online and it was by far the best learning experience I have had.

I wonder if it can create output suitable for 3d printers

On top of that, the most likely thing is that they will increase the GST to fund this, which of course has the most relative impact on the less wealthy.

We sure have our share of rednecks on sundecks in Australia. The only thing more retrograde and embarrassing is the fact that Abbott was going around trying to form some sort of 'coaltion of climate change denying countries', whose sole purpose was to oppose action on climate change. I seriously don't think I've ever heard of anything so stupid in my life. Normal people create alliances to achieve something like 'reduce poverty', 'increase economic growth / trade' etc, but Abbott wants to be the first to create an alliance to not do something.

It is well organised, robust, structured, with lots of unit / integration tests.

I still tiptoe though, because in my experience over-confidence is a recipe for disaster.

How about, so long labels and snake oil, hello independent thought.

Work out a process that suits your project and team members, evolve, drop the buzz.

Quick. Everybody get out their 'web standards' sticks and lets all beat this guy up. The web must be done with standards, otherwise someone might not be able to use some web pages on some device at some point in time, and that is not acceptable.

I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use. When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to read the whole thread to realize the context.

Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.

It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.

Yes, never dismiss it. In fact a lot of the time over-engineering is just another form of technical debt, but it also has an upfront cost as well. At least the under engineered solution is cheap up front.

I would much rather come across something under engineered than over engineered.

Something that gives a counter opinion to group think is never appreciated. Better we all sit around and stroke our egos, with every statement implying how magnificent we are and at the same time implying how everyone else is churning out debt filled shit.

I think analogies generally suck. Better to analyze things for what they are. Analogies are good for explaining difficult to understand concepts, but all to often people say, x is analogous with y, y has something good/bad about it, therefore x has something good/bad about it.

Technical debt is a good example of a bad analogy :

1. Assume some piece of code works, technical debt is only an issue if that code ever needs to be modified. Financial debt is always an issue regardless of what happens, even if you die.

2. Writing some code that generates the so called technical debt will often have an upfront cost saving, so whilst it might incur some extra work down the track, the extra work isn't a straight cost. The cost = (extra work - time saved up front).

3. Attempting to avoid technical debt often ends up with over-engineered code.

4. Being dogmatic and avoiding technical debt in all projects is often not good for the project / business / investors. Being early to market at the cost of code quality is often very important.

I think point 3 is the worst scourge of all. It is quite common amongst mid-range developers. After working for a while they start to get good development skills and start to think too much, looking for ways to express their skills.

In summary, it is like most things in life, there is a balance to be found.

Are you talking Java or javascript?

I don't know if its that surprising that js isn't more popular. Html5 hasn't been supported by browsers for nearly as long. I've done the Udacity html5 game course and worked with flash a bit, and the tooling for Flash makes it easier / faster to build apps/games.

2072 until I got bored.

I get the feeling you just like having a rant about unions. As the parent said, unions aren't relevant for software startups.

BTW, I personally don't like unions. I think they were needed in the past, but now they are just trying to find a reason to exist.

They are geeks not nerds.

I would argue that its a geek game, not a nerd game.

Either way I have wasted dozens of hours playing, and it taught me how tedious other people can be.

I want someone to save me from the people who want to save me from myself.

Quality Journalism = oxymoron

My father is 80 this year and still works 4-5 days a week. He was a commercial banker until he got a golden handshake at around 60. He retired for about 5 years but got bored and since then has been working as a book keeper / accountant for a small company.

He is probably luckly, because his friend owns the business where he works, but I am impressed nonetheless.

Interesting enough, but can someone explain the title. I assume it is some reference to tree hugging but I don't get it.

It is quite arbitrary to mourn someone you don't know who was a relative of someone else you don't know.

However I am inclined to agree, just let it go, if people want to mourn let them mourn, even if it just bandwagon jumping. If you asked Nietzsche, he would probably say they are just mourning their own mortality, ie there is no such thing as a selfless act, they are just doing to feel good about themselves.

And surely it won't be as bad as the Steve Jobs fiasco.

Ditto

Where I come from, friends don't let friends use singletons (drugs are okay though).

Show me a singleton and I'll show you a doubleton, no wait, its a tripleton....

I've done the same.

I use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone and I was using desktop Chrome for years. However I started to notice things that worried me, for example I would be using Chrome on my PC but definitely not logged into Gmail / Google+, then I would see that my recent google searches from the desktop Chrome would appear in my recent searches list on Android within seconds. I could somewhat accept that if I was logged in to Google, but I don't accept that if I am logged out.

On one hand the functionality is pretty impressive, on the other hand my gut feeling is they have gone too far.

Well to be fair the rest of my trip was much less eventful, but there were two other incidents of note.

In Manhattan, whilst watching the cockroaches in my hotel room and perusing the brown paper bag full of porn mags I found behind the bed, I heard someone rattling my door quite loudly so I yelled out 'hey', and he replied 'sorry man, i thought it was my room'.

In Virginia I was driving on a side road that I thought should lead back to the 'blue ridge parkway'. I pulled over to take a piss in the bushes, and whilst pissing I noticed a dead deer with a bullet hole in its neck.

I don't know if my anecdote constitutes data, but the first time I went to the US in 1999 I landed at JFK, hired a car, was driving along slowly looking for an entrance to a freeway to Brooklyn. A guy in a convertible pulled out in front of me so close that I had to swerve into the left lane to avoid him, once I passed him I changed back into the right lane so I could use the upcoming freeway entrance, the guy roared past me, swerved back in front of me and jammed his brakes so quickly I barely was able to stop without hitting him. He then sat there in front of me yelling something for about 30 seconds whilst waving a gun in the air. He then took off and I never saw him again.

I'm not sure what that means exactly but I think it indicates a culture of aggression, bullying, anger, self importance, and when coupled with loose gun laws it means lots of guns get fired.

Even if it has decreased by 49%, 51% of a big number is still a big number.

I don't have much time, but firstly :

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/8...

2. I use ctl-shift-f a lot where I double click the matches and it takes you to the code windows. That always stops working after a few hours.

3. Web service in a solution no longer spin up automatically. I have to start them manually everytime I open VS. Combined with point 2 is extra annoyance.

4. Connecting to Azure via Server Explorer -> Windows Azure -> Connect to Windows Azure requires me to first go do some other random thing otherwise I get a non-nondescript 'network error'

5. I upgraded to update 2 and it quietly turned a number of crucial references to 'Copy local = false', which didn't stop the app working on my machine because I had the sdk installed of the relevant library, it only broke on test machines.

6. Not that I use it much, but yesterday I noticed the WPF designer randomly stops me from changing simple properties such as margins. It works for some properties and not the others.