killbot5000

rachelbythebay.com

> Engineers don't generally enjoy paying off technical debt, it's a chore. But they recognise that it must be done sometimes.

I disagree. Most engineers I work with like refactoring. It’s usually well defined work with clear metrics for success. It can also reduce daily pain if it makes delicate/messy code much easier to work with.

The problem with refactoring is that its only value is in improved execution of future projects. So it can be extremely valuable or completely useless. It depends on how likely the refactored things are to be worked on again.

The simplest example I can think of is: Map(slice, func)

You can can implement this generically in Go using interface{} types and runtime type checking, but then you have runtime type checking failures.

A java/c++-esque "generics" implementation would be able to type-check at compile time.

It seems like this is being used as a cheap tactic to avoid giving users meaningful and accurate feedback. Eg the loan approval example, if the user was presented with the details of what got them the approval instantly, it might be more convincing than an instantaneous response with no rational. The artificial wait just gives the space for the user to make up a cause for the delay and walk away with a completely incorrect perception about how the system works, which is great if your goal is to manipulate people’s behavior using psychological tricks.

And who wins depends on how fast you're going while watching.

It's well within the rights of a state to regulate the vehicles that operate on its roads. Those regulations may (and do) include having a visible license plate with up to date registration stickers.

You are free to drive unregistered vehicles on private land.

Aren't you supposed to do that? It gives the bikers heads up to slow or navigate to the left of the vehicle turning right. Otherwise the chance for collision is higher when the vehicle suddenly cuts off the bikers during its turn.

Edit: image from sf bicycle coalition. http://www.sfbike.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Right-Turn....

> and even calculates the tip

Who the hell are you tipping?

There are new techniques wrt to garbage collected languages and hard deadlines (eg, every period has a dedicated amount of time to garbage collection, whether it needs it or not).

Coffee! Heyooo

I did this exact same thing as well and am in a similar situation.

Since the author admittedly made up the term "complete expression" whose definition mirrors what I would expect for just "expression". He also used the word "subexpression" to describe parts of something that would otherwise be called a "statement".

Though I think his vocabulary is a little confusing, after re-reading I think I get what he's actually complaining about. It is really awkward for a <%= %> tag to not actually be a self-contained, parse-able expression. On the other hand, you'd really rather have things like form_for return the text to print, not just print it (thus allowing the use of the <%= %> instead of <% %>). It's just one of those annoying situations where attempting to be pure and elegant results in an ugly kludge in the real world.

The author seems to be unfamiliar with the "expression" and "statement" conventions used by imperative languages. An expression is something which has a value, whereas a statement describes an action that doesn't (necessarily) have a result. <%= %> expects an expression ie something that has a value. <% %> expects a statement (or series of statements), which don't necessarily have a value.

Don't forget easy ssh host hopping.

ssh -oProxyCommand="ssh host1 nc host2 22" host2

Lots of segmentation fault diagnosis