army

"46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss."

I guess I'm not quite clear what this is claiming - you could read it as saying that tossing a coin would be as effective as current recruiting practices, or you could read it as saying that current recruiting practices just aren't as effective as hoped. I think the author meant the second thing, but it's pretty confusing.

If it's the first, then you were selecting candidates completely randomly, then the percentage of successful people you hire would be the same as the percentage of successful people in the applicant pool. There's no reason to think that ~50% of the candidate pool will be successful - I'd think less.

The additional rules are normally from valid considerations, e.g.:

* Whether its ok to stop temporarily depends on how busy the road is.

* The parking spots are on a major road that has a lot of traffic from commuters - you need the extra lane at certain times.

* The parking spots are near a school or other attraction that has predictable bursts of parking demand.

You can resolve some of this by being overly restrictive about parking, but that's a suboptimal solution. If the parking spots are near businesses then I can guarantee that there will be lobby groups very unhappy with the suboptimal solution.

Some of those issues are just a lack of common sense. Of course no stopping implies no parking. Reminds me of an episode of Parking Wars where people were trying to argue that they didn't know what "No Standing" meant so it was ok to park there. I don't understand why you wouldn't apply the principle of caution she's invoking and not park somewhere if you're not sure that you understand the signs.

That said, the signs are an improvement and are pretty nice. It's a bit harder to deal with issues like school days - maybe there needs to be a number or web site on the sign that you can use to check school days?

The general points against people trying to establish a rigid hierarchy of languages make a lot of sense - people make a lot of dumb generalizations about programming languages.

I think the article makes a lot of bad claims and arguments though in the service of an overall point that is valid, so it was frustrating to read.

Sometimes the technical differences between languages are actually significant - even though many can be used for multiple purposes, it doesn't mean they can be used for all purposes or have equivalent properties.

I also think there's a bit of a strawman there: "he community and libraries, rather than the technical features, are most important in determining the languages people choose". It's true that the libraries, community and conventions around a language are as important as the language itself, but I think people's statements about the programming language usually mean the whole complex of things around it, rather than just the core language + standard libraries.

I'm also not sure why they resorted to using random internet comments - some of which seem to be entirely tongue in cheek - to support their argument. It doesn't really detract from the points, but it's distracting.

"It is possible to eat healthier at each chain. You can ... order from the “Skinnys” menu at Potbelly, which has sandwiches with fewer than 400 calories."

Or you could skip the chips, cookie or drink, or order the regular size (not the big size). Or have a different sandwich from the Italian, which has the highest calorie content of all the sandwiches on the menu. It's not rocket science.

Honestly I expect a little better than such a blatant false dichotomy from the article.

I think its a bit harsh to call the papers "filler", but the reality is that most papers (in CS, anyway) are incremental work on important but well-studied problems or work on problems that are fairly narrow or not universally considered to be important. Reviewers tend to have wildly divergent opinions on how important or interesting that kind of work is.

I think people are reading more into this than there is. Reviewing papers is a highly subjective, high variance process, and very few papers get universally positive reviews.

From the point of view of an author, if you get a paper rejected that you know is worthwhile, you just have to make whatever improvements you can and then submit it again.

I have a coworker who sometimes vertically aligns code. It's frustrating having to edit his code because I have to choose between just making my changes and ruining his vertical alignment, or having to spend time realigning things. It's not a part of our coding standard.

I think you're wasting your time trying to convince people who don't want to see what's right in front of their nose. It's not remotely plausible that events in Crimea and Donbass could have transpired without a great deal of direct and indirect support from the Russian authorities.

It's entirely obvious by now that there are large numbers of Russian troops and military vehicles operating in Eastern Ukraine. They were fighting directly with Ukrainian forces before the ceasefire and probably still are now to a lesser extent. The other irregular forces have clearly been helped directly by Russia allowing them to operate freely on Russian territory, with manpower and training from the Russian military, and food, hardware and supplies from Russian military stocks.

Putin eventually admitted after the fact that the little green men in Crimea were Russian soldiers. Only fools would believe any claims that they're not deeply involved in what's gone on in Donbass and other parts of eastern Ukraine.

You do realise that Putin openly admitted that Russian troops were involved in the Crimea takeover? The "bought their uniforms in a store" explanation of the little green men wasn't remotely believable even at the time for many reasons, but even the Kremlin isn't trying to sell that any more.

That doesn't seem that esoteric to me: in general the problem is that repr() can result in execution of arbitrary code, and that there's no way to cleanly and reliably terminate arbitrary code. This includes Python code: it's possible to terminate it at an arbitrary point, but that leaves things in an indeterminate state.

I think it's pretty important that you shouldn't add features with unpredictable behaviour into the core of the language, particularly into error handling code.

I've heard people say before that usually when an article's headline is a "provocative" question, the answer is no. That seems to hold true here.

I think it's important to consider that people interpreting benchmarks need to be skeptical and aware of the scope of the results: a lot of problems are as much from people overgeneralising results as from bad experimental methodology.

Go's threading model is M:N threading. N is the fixed number of kernel threads, M is the variable number of application threads.

I think there's also another point, which is that the endpoint isn't to churn out CS students to be good workers that plug immediate needs in industry: it's to produce graduates are going to have the tools to do things better and maybe even put the existing people out of business.

That's like saying that ever programmer in industry should spend 5-10 hours a week keeping up with the latest CS research on top of the work they put into their continuing education. It's just not reasonable to expect academics to know the latest JQuery or Enterprise Confabulator or whatever API.

If you're doing CS education, you have a very small window of opportunity at the start of someone's career to teach them things that they're not necessarily going to pick up working in industry. You really need to think about what you can teach them that will allow them to be prepared for 30-40 year careers and whatever technological changes that brings.

It's back up now.

Jif seems to have superseded this Swift (the secure web one): http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/

There were actually two (released at approximately the same time): http://swift-lang.org. Apparently the name isn't terribly original.

If you want mathematics to be it's own little walled garden free from ambiguity, that's fine. But don't you think it's kind of important that people be able to translate between problems in the messy non-mathematical universe and mathematics.

Even if you have to show your work, a lot of students will just blindly try a few canned approaches until they get something that looks about right. Actually understanding what you're doing is definitely more efficient, but a lot of people muddle through without really understanding the reasoning.

One of the worst examples of that mentality I saw in a first year university course was a multi-part question where one part had the student calculate something and the next part had the student do something to sanity check the answer. One student got the first part wrong and then fudged the working in the second part to get it to say that the first answer was correct. Of course, this completely misses the point of checking the answer. Worse, they came up to me after class and argued that they deserved full points because the second error was "a consequence of" the first one. They seemed totally perplexed that I didn't agree.

That completely ignores the fact that people don't know what they don't know, or tend to erroneously assume that something they don't know about isn't relevant.

And entrepreneurs should look very carefully at the human rights records of any countries they move to, including Singapore, regardless of how clean the streets are.

Singapore already has an (unjustified) superiority complex about Australia, articles like this don't help. I don't mean to diminish what Singapore has accomplished over the last fifty or sixty years - it could have turned out very differently - but the reality is that Singapore's civil society and democracy isn't robust. The human rights issues are a big thing, but even if you write that off, then politically Singapore still has all its eggs in one basket. If the ruling party ceases to be competent, it's difficult to say what will happen: any viable opposition parties are sued into oblivion and there hasn't been a peaceful transfer of power in over 50 years.

I don't think the cable companies have much of a side. I think a large part of the problem is complacency about improving service on the cable companies' side rather than active malfeasance: they simply don't have to work very hard to retain customers since the local markets are monopolies or small, stable, oligopolies.

There just needs to be some more competition to hold their feet to the fire.

Right, and the problem is that their version of best effort doesn't involve trying very hard at all, since they have minimal competition in most local markets.

Really? China's regular court system has even less transparency and integrity than the Guantanamo courts, let alone the regular U.S. court system. I'd have more chance of a fair trial at Guantanamo than in any court in China if the party authorities had decided that you were guilty.

When China isn't a single-party authoritarian state, maybe then we can talk.

Right, I think people forget that Java essentially aimed to be a vastly simplified version of C++ with garbage collection and memory safety. This was something a lot of people were crying out for at the time. There were some bad decisions in early Java (making data structures synchronized by default, lack of generics), but it's got to the point now where it's pretty good at what it's intended to be.

The danger with the "speed doesn't matter" attitude is that you end up with a 10x slowdown due to language choice, and then another 10x slowdown due to inefficient implementation, and you end up with a 100x slowdown, which might actually be significant even in situations where speed doesn't matter that match.

I'm a native English speaker and I can guarantee you that I'd never knowingly say or write "an hotel".