mtVessel

"...greater use of effective strategies did not explain the persistence of the grittier types"

"however...the greater use of these two effective strategies did not explain why these high trait self-control individuals tended to enjoy greater success at aversive challenges"

So, in fact, this study identified which strategies were effective in people who were (self-reportedly) already effective at handling aversive tasks.

Except in this case, where it is required to distinguish the sentence being true in a literal, as opposed to figurative, sense.

Aristotle came to the same conclusions somewhat earlier, using only natural intelligence and manual learning techniques.

So help me, Codd.

It's not an "API doc" in the modern sense, but the DEC VMS manuals are the best-written tech docs I have ever seen.

The next time someone asks me why I'm choosing a proprietary solution, rather than one of the many fine open-source options available, I'm just going to point them to this comment.

Charitable. "What mean you by these postings?" suggests someone other than the tam.

This one goes to eleven.

The phrase is also commonly used in the sense of an "ad hominem attack", meaning an attack directly on a person's character or actions, rather than their work or ideas. It doesn't always refer to the fallacy.

I might just be slow, but I can't tell from your landing page exactly what types of things I would document with this. Is it just APIs?

It reads like a random collection of facts. There's no narrative to it.

I'm confused. Is this list automated or curated? "Curated by machine" seems like an oxymoron.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

Although, what Sulzberger actually said was:

“Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be,” he wrote. “Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/business/media/new-york-t...

The sample doesn't really give me a sense of whether this book is right for me. It contains a lot of material from the early chapters, but little of the parts of that confused me in college.

My primary question is whether this book is good at conveying the reasoning that promotes intuition around the more difficult (for me) topics, such as vector spaces and the many theorems associated with the Fundamental Theorem of LA?

If not, suggestions for other resources are very welcome!

Forcing?

Brooks' view is much more closely aligned with Boehm's Spiral Model than with Agile. He valued an overarching design that satisfied all stakeholders before construction. He also recommended a top-down approach to iteration, which means prototyping the entire system with each iteration, in successive degrees of refinements. I find that very different than picking features to implement with each sprint. He also found PERT charts to be invaluable, and I can't imagine he would find Kanban boards a sufficient substitute.

I don't understand the author's point about the two heaps. Clearly there are two separate propositions at play -- the "heapness" of either pile, and whether or not the two heap-like entities are identical. The first requires fuzzy logic because the definition of "heap" is vague. The second does not because the rules (take a grain off one for each grain removed from the other) are precisely defined. There is no inherent contradiction just because two different systems are in use at once.

As is often the case, DNA nailed it, thusly:

"In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul."

For his next project, he should learn how to end an essay.

Nobody wants their data on their own device. Nobody knows how their devices even work, let alone wants the responsibility of managing them.

What they want is what they're (sorta, kinda) being given. My device takes my data and puts it somewhere where all my other devices know how to get it. I don't wanna know how it happens, I just want magic.

We, who know how our devices work, and don't want anyone else managing our data for us, are in a vanishingly small minority.

The big companies are putting their money on clouds and centralization. And that's where it'll all go, because they have all the leverage. Twenty years from now, I'd love to reflect on how wrong I was to say this. But right now, I doubt it.

"We" don't?

cum: http://grammarist.com/usage/cum/

This is why writers like Chris Date take great pains to explain that "null value" is an oxymoron. Null is a "mark", not a value -- it exists entirely apart from any domain. Any language or environment that doesn't respect this abuses the entire concept.

That's because the worth of votes are in aggregate, not individually. Individually infinitesimal is not the same thing as individually inconsequential.

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -Stanislaw Jerzy

If you live in the same country as I do, I definitely think you shouldn't vote. That way, my vote counts more.

Huh?

If everyone's vote carries the same weight, then in a large pool, everyone's vote is equally meaningless. So, logically, if my vote is almost certainly not going to cast the deciding ballot, then I should stay home. And so should everyone else.

If everyone stays home, then all it takes for my candidate to win is for me to go to the polls. All of a sudden, my vote is the most meaningful vote in the entire election!

"Everyone's vote counts equally" only applies to those who actually, y'know, vote.

Or, try this argument: The premise of voting is not that it matters whose vote tips the scales. The premise of voting is that the candidate who gets the most people to vote for him or her wins. So you only need to vote if you actually care who wins. And if you do care who wins, you don't actually care about the relative contribution of any individual vote, including your own.

So you're arguing that if inflicting pain produces better decisions (as it occasionally does), it is not just morally acceptable, but an actual positive force for good?

If only they provided tools for the recipients, too.

For what it's worth, you're not alone in that feeling. People love to make graph visualizations, but I rarely see the practical benefit.

Mind you, a good deal of my professional life has been spent as a data modeler. I would love better ways of visualizing complex relationships. But graphing everything doesn't seem to help.

Apparently no one wanted to defend 432 Park.

Funny, I think of the age divide running the other way. Younger devs, who came up during the age of agile, take YAGNI as a given, while older devs have seen the results of too many hasty decisions.

The advice I was given when I started out was, "it's cheaper to fix something upstream". Catching a potential problem during design is always cheaper than catching it during development, which is cheaper again than catching it after release.

This argument always seems to get lost in the YAGNI discussion.