sp4rki

But that's exactly the point I was trying to make, albeit I wasn't very good at getting it across the internetz. Assembler is not truly "one language" it's actually a collection of mnemonics that are all extremely similar but based on specific architectures and instruction sets.

The point I want to get across is that for you C is a low level language. To the guy programming a fancy toaster in whatever version of an Assembly language C is a high level language. To be anally retentive and follow your comment about the ranking of languages, if I follow that logic then the only two low level languages would be C, Assembly, and perhaps a compiler complier circa the early 70's that whose name I cant remember. The difference between Assembler and C is extremely jarring in comparison to the difference between C and Javascript (for example).

One thing to note is that C is used a lot for low level systems programming and because of it it's so commonly described as a low level programming language. That said, writing low level systems programs does not mean that we're exclusively using a low level language to do so.

Assembly is not one language (even if they all look very alike). It's a collection of opcodes or mnemonics specific to a specific architecture with a specific instruction set that map to the later. Even then writing assembly for MASM, TASM, WASM, or WhateverASM for Linux, Windows, or Winux (or whatever) can and will probably differ in structure and in the specific mnemonics used.

There's machine code, low level languages which are basically the plethora of different Assembly languages, and high level languages which provide abstractions to either or both of the former languages and resemble the actual written language. Putting C in the low level languages rank is doing a disservice to the language and not taking into account the bunch of people that program (for example) embedded devices in whatever architecture they're using.

C is and will (probably) always be a high level language by definition. That it's categorized as a lower level high level language than say Python or Ruby does not magically make it a low level language. There are low level languages which map mnemonics to instruction sets and high level languages that provide an abstraction over having to use the former and are more akin to the written word. That hasn't changed just because we have "higher level high level languages" these days.

Langauge itself is a highly variable thing. People can understand something completely different from what the originator intended, but it doesn't change what said originator meant by it. People can always say "oh C is not a high level language because I think that a low level language should be X and Y" the same way they can say "oh men have to have a beard and know how to fight to be be real men", but in reality men - beards or not - are still fundamentally men.

Hah I can relate to that! I will clarify something though, the effect is really cool and I actually like it. What annoyed me is that I had initially opened it and moved it to another pane (dwm here) and then when I moved it the main panel I was using a smaller window than usual and when I scrolled I couldn't hit any links, animation looked weird, and then I couldn't scroll past the header.

I browsed it again in a floating window in a different tab (or space if you wanna call it that way) where I keep a maximized chromium and I was no longer annoyed :) Good job on being on the cutting edge though, that is something I completely can appreciate.

I'm impressed with the explanations and everything... but what really got my panties in a bunch is the visualization technology. That is one of the prime examples I've seen of actually leveraging current web tech to communicate actual content instead of just doing fancy stuff just because. I was initially annoyed by the 3D header movement effect, but the content, graphs, and animations of the actual content made me completely forget that and allowed me to be bewildered by what we can do this day and age on the web. Congrats to the maker!

That is exactly what I've always though happens. I'd argue that, with ATMs, since you're dealing with software that after a transaction has passed commands hardware to mechanically dispense pieces of paper that there are two different processes going on.

If the transaction passed (the human facing ATM part at least) you effectively withdrew the money, software wise you actually took it. If something happens in the procedure of actually giving you the money the machine informs something the likes of: "hey Mr. Software, something went wrong here, credit that back please". I'd argue that if everything was enclosed into one transaction you could have an edge case in which the "money transaction" passed, the cash was dispensed, something went wrong just after and you get a roll back of everything but the money was still physically withdrawn.

ATMs have cameras, so in the case that the cash was not dispensed, they can manually fix the problem and credit your account in case of a claim (they have the camera footage and the ATM's paper trail). On the other hand if everything was enclosed into one transaction, it might be a bit awkward for a bank to tell you a week later: "Hey man, we made a mistake and we now need to take out 500 dollars out of you account, but be assured we're right about this here..."

Hell people see the bank crediting you something you did not take as good customer service, but I'm pretty sure that people will complain about the bank taking money from them if it's not done at the exact moment where they took the action of taking said money out of their accounts.

I agree completely. Sadly this is an extension of the democratic capitalist way of life. Once upon a time a group of people we're lead by the strongest, the most intelligent, and the most experienced. It was natural selection at it's finest. Now the concept of power is based on money, distinguishment, and popularity, and not on strength, smarts, and age.

Radicalized revolutionary socialism? If greed and self preservation wasn't such an important factor in the common peoples agenda perhaps. The reality is that history has taught us that the usual alternatives to the capitalist-imperialist driven society we live in today is radicalization of a substancial mass of people which invariably ends up with a non-insignificant number of causalities of the human, pedagogical, religious, and/or cultural types.

And then you have people using those ideals to strike with unnecessary violence at what they define as their enemies... and then you get the PFLP saying they're fighting for the same ideals you're fighting. And then you get a bunch of people speaking about nationalism, antisemitism, racism, and then politics, politics, politics.

I'm probably reading too much into what this discussion is actually about (it's a bit early for me), but I just wanted to contribute that I think that our current regimes are probably unsustainable if we as a world population keep growing at such expeditious rates as we are right now. That being said, I have no proposal. Bigger people than me have tried to come up with such propositions, and I'm not planning on organizing another french revolution.

There are a lot of great designers, and a whole lot less great developers. And to make matters worse, the typical startup seldom needs more than a couple of designers vs needing a small army of developers - therefore increasing demand for good developers with a decent track record and decreasing job opportunities for the common graphic designer. Also, this graphic designers gravitate towards big design shops (since there is less opportunities as opposed to an "In House Designer") who then have a supernumerary selection choices for both, the top end very well paid designer and the photoshop grunt who spends his days pen tooling people out of photos for use in advertisement.

Another point to take into consideration is that most designers on the rise end up managing art and/or marketing departments in which case they stop being graphic designers and end up with titles such as Creative Director, Brand Manager, etc... while a whole lot of developers on the rise keep being developers, albeit of the Senior Developer, X Specialty Dev/Architect/Programmer, et al. This last point will probably skew the charts a little bit unless you take into consideration the carrer paths of typical top end graphical designers.

Belize is part of North America if you where referring to South America as a continent, which is why they call it the "Americas". If you're referring to South America as a division of the American Continent Belize would be part of Central America. Just being politically correct here. :)

That being said, I live in Central America and I agree with the whole of your comment. People in here are generally atrocious with technology and are in love with their bribes and free stuff. Combine everything and you have an awesome "target audience" for malware distribution. And hey, you can always keep your private armies in the multiple jungle settings from Guatemala and farther south...

I'm waiting with my popcorn in hand for some people to get pissed off and start a "revolutionary" movement to bring down mainstream media companies' attempts to hold on to their outdated business models with guerilla tactics. It will be called the RLO which stands for the Redditors Liberation Army. Sad part? I'm not even kidding...

That's exactly what it is. Even my technically uninitiated ex girlfriend is now just torrenting movies and shows because they're becoming to hard to get a hold of decent content to watch. I've been paying for a huge chunk of my content in the last few years, but just because of this story I'm probably going to pirate any Universal and Hbo content I'd like to consume...

chickenfury.com - Ohhh the oxymoron made me do it. I even had a mascot in mind, though I've never gotten around to use it.

lamborgenie.com - Pretty obvious if you ask me :P

Haven't had such problems with Arch in the last couple of months really. I value more the customizability and control that Arch offers than pretty much anything else. It hits the proverbial spot in my quasi-requirement mixture from both Gentoo and Slackware usage. Ubuntu might be easier to get going and maintain, but it's goal of becoming a distro for the common men and women of the world does not align well with me to be honest. Both Ubuntu and Debian are too opinionated for my taste.

To be fair, at work I've used Debian a lot for servers, and it had worked pretty good all the time with very few exceptions. In comparison Ubuntu (which I know is Debian based) always breaks for me. It's amazing how I can always get stuff done in minutes in Debian but I always have a problem with Ubuntu. This is to the point that I would rather work with the botched in-house distro of Solaris I used on a mini mainframe I used to work with and maintain some 8 years ago than Ubuntu. Even with the weird customized vi/vim it had, that made life for me and the sys admin incredibly painful.

All that being said... Slackware was the distro that made me fall in love with Linux a decade and a half ago, and one of the reasons I'm jumping out of the Apple bandwagon is their recent tendency to make their machines more common-user friendly, but less of an "hackers" machine. Therefore, I'm tremendously biased regarding Os' and Distros.

You could easily get a cheap 420 or 520 and try it out for a while. The only thing that I'll be keeping a mac mini I have in the corner of the desk for is photoshop to be honest. Why are you stuck on OSX if I may ask?

I think this is a good idea. Thinkpads have evolved to a point where - regardless of IBM or Lenovo being the brand behind the product line - the name is a synonym of dependability and quality. I think that by separating the brand from the rest of the Lenovo pack, and giving it it's own two feet they might steal quite a bit of Apple's customers.

I went from my own homemade machines, to exclusively Apple hardware, to owning a t420 (wanted the old keyboard). I'm in the process of leaving the Apple ecosystem and going back to Linux (Arch to be specific) because I dislike the direction Apple is going (the Mac App Store was the inflection point that made me want to leave). The Thinkpad brand was the obvious choice because of upgradeability, quality, dependency, and the fact that they make some of the best laptops for Linux. Even better than Zareason and system 76 hardware IMO. Making the perfect business computing tools AND at the same time the perfect Linux portable hardware is a big plus in my book. Even more than unibody pieces of aluminum and the retina bs that while commendable to a point, I've found is more of a nuisance than anything else.

Anyways, Lenovo earned a customer by keeping the Thinkpad brand alive and maintaining it's quality standards. Any step to make the brand better is AOK with me.

Sell your TV and make it a conscious choice to not look at a screen past say 7pm.

I've been reading a minimum of one novel a week and from one to three tech/design/cooking/misc/etc books a month over the past 16 years. Sure there are exceptions, for example reading Game of Thrones took me at least two weeks per novel and the third book took me a full month.

Also, get a kindle. I don't read much technical books on it but it's a godsend for novels and not accumulating a bunch of paperbacks. Unless you don't enjoy reading as a pastime, in which case don't waste your time because you can actually burn out reading too much.

That means that actually getting a job is not part of your skill set. Regardless of what the rest of the world tells you, getting a job and being good at negotiating perks is a talent. Sure unemployment is rising and all that BS, but lets be real, getting into the business with a degree is easy as long as you don't expect an awesome job, pay, and perks from the get go.

You have three options: a) apply everywhere and deal with a crappy job for a year or two and then search for something more "fun" b) go build some stuff and hope people start to notice (I wish I had done this... Cest la vie), or c) learn some cobol and go maintain some legacy system while working for a PHB.

I don't want to come off as a grumpy negative person, but if you can't get a crappy underpaying job in the tech industry you should really re-evaluate what's going on... It has probably more to do with bad social skills, a lack of talent, or a big ego than with the actual job market.

That is something that was not said or implied on the text in question. As a matter of fact, the point given across has very little to do with how helpful either one of us perceives a programmer's and doctor's "contributions" over the course of their careers, but how there is no age limitation which stops a person from "helping" others and how the "value" of your service is determined by talent, discipline, and effort while not necessarily being attached to a title.

Here's a thought, I come a family of doctors, lawyers, and architects (in order of occurrence within the family), and I've achieved the realization that thinking the "importance" of a person is defined by their profession is incredibly misguided. Being a doctor does not mean that you'll save a life, and being a programmer does not mean that you wont. Actually, there are as many type of doctors as you have organs, diseases, and appendages, as many lawyers as there are clauses in a EULA, and as many programmers as programming language books... and all of them are just people whose helpfulness will be defined by what they do with their life's and not because one's a doctor and the other a circus clown.

I'm not trying to be mean spirited or demean the work of doctors or lawyers (or programmers for that matter), but you've stated that the article's writer sounded arrogant because for you his opinion was only valid if it followed a specific train of thought that lead to a direct comparison of two stereotypes - the lifesaving doctor and the cave-dwelling programmer - and I believe that to be wrong. I know I'm being overly dramatic with my examples, but let me finish with one small nugget: Who's "contributions" are worth more? Neil deGrasse Tyson's or Dr. Robert Rey's?

I think he meant helping people out as a function or extension of your profession. You can help people regardless of what your career choices are/will be, but you cannot (legally at least) perform brain surgery at 15. You can however create bulletin board software at the same age and distribute it to a large audience.

(Hypothetical) "Dude I can help you get up if you fall, but I can't help you survive cancer as I'm not a doctor yet, but I can make some software to schedule your medicine intake and therapy sessions though..."

Arrogant? I think you missed the most important part of that statement.

"... couldn’t for another five or so years given that I (likely) wouldn’t even be in law or med school yet."

You can become a "programmer" at 18 for example. You can't become a "doctor" at the same age though - Doogie Howser excepted. He never said that doctors aren't important or that he believes that programmers contribute more to society than doctors do. He said that the path he chose enabled him to give back earlier and in a grander scale than compared to the traditional paths to become part of the doctors and lawyers of the world... And he is correct in making said statement.

How about if next time you call someone arrogant, you make sure you didn't leave reading comprehension out the door?

Sad as it may be, why is this getting upvoted? This is very VERY far away from the posting guidelines. Anyways, carry on...

Oh I would definitely agree with you just based on the clarity it provides (not even taking into account code size or elegance), but my coworker couldn't use TimeSpan because of certain domain specific criteria so I took his word for it and didn't even give it any thought. I just asked him what the problem/challenge was, grabbed a piece of paper, and did it with math and then just copied it to the code. In my defense, while testing both methods my solution worked reliably, while his had some pretty weird results on some extreme edge cases. With the amount of nested If/Else's he probably missed a couple of things as has been discussed on this thread previously.

In my defense, moving the logic to a pure arithmetic solution resulted in a procedure that takes a bit less than one third of my screen, while the old one was at least 6 or 7 pages of scrolling through nested conditionals.

Not necessarily I believe. That assumption is pretty much community, geography, age, OS, and niche dependent. I use - and have for at least 10 years - a combination of Vim, Tmux, and the usual linux utils under Zsh (I actually used screen for the first few years) for my text editing needs. That being said, I learned Vim in Linux at the same time I was learning C when I was a kid. I've noticed that generally people that started on the Rails bandwagon (which I love btw) or on OSX as their first dev platform use Mvim/Gvim. That said, I've noticed the more "unixy" people using Vim on a terminal. There are exceptions to both rules of course.

Not my intention to get a debate going about this though, just offering a slightly differing point of view.

I know that this isn't probably the case you speak of when you say "If your code reads like math, I expect that its probably done right.", but I have a huge tendency to minimize code size by converting everything to "math". I converted a few hundred lines of C# code full of if statements made by a junior dev into this (more or less):

  var minutesToAddToAlert = (timeToAddInMinutes) + (900 * ((timeToAddInMinutes + 
                            (currentTimeOfDayInMinutes - 510)) / 540)) +
                            (2880*(((currentTimeOfDayInMinutes + (1440*dayOfTheWeek)) + 
                            ((timeToAddInMinutes) + (900 * ((timeToAddInMinutes + 
                            (currentTimeOfDayInMinutes - 510)) / 540))) ) / 7200));

  var nextAlertDate = currentDate.AddMinutes(minutesToAddToAlert);

There is definitely a lot more to it than just this, but I don't like blocks of code that don't fit on my vertical 24 inch screens. So I always end up converting "logic" (if's and else's) to math. It's a pet peeve of mine (as is overusing ternary operators as my own personal way of doing haiku), and while I certainly decrease the vertical size of the code itself, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to understand for everyone else. I then have to write comments explaining what stuff like this does, and those comments can get rather obtuse depending on the time of day.

Everyone winces when they see my commits with this message: "Math. Converted X and Y to M-A-T-H. Math. :D"

Well I claim vim is the ultimate editor (as it is my preference and opinion), and at the same time I can say that: Not only do I prefer Visual Studio when working on dot net stuff, AND not only do I prefer Eclipse most of the time when working with JAVA while using GUI Linux... but they're both most definitely a better choice than Vim in both cases. Using vim in both cases would be using the inferior tool. So he's wrong on his generalization. Moving along...

Honestly, what is the damn point anyways? He made a completely useless comment based on a bs assumption that in all honestly sounds more like a person who just got frustrated and decided to go against the flow of the river. I find it very annoying. Specially since this discussion always seems to start because the other side starts making the same generalization over and over and over again. Now I'm more annoyed. Hah.

1) Baseless or not - your generalization is just as bad (or even worse) as the inverse case.

2) He didn't tell you his list of requirements just so you would change your mind about whatever your opinion is at the moment. He did it to explain why people say what the say so fanatically. As a matter of fact, those weren't even requirements per se.

3) Regarding the "best power-tool" comment. His list of "requirements" DID INCLUDE what you just talked about. There are better tools than vim + command-line in specific cases - according to the GP - and he gave you examples of his opinion on such IDEs. Visual Studio is pretty much THE exemplary case, though I supplement it with ViEmu as editing code in a way that's not modal or having to use the arrow keys seems completely foreign to me after years of indoctrination.

He made it clear that he believes that the people that go cookoo for vim + command-line or emacs are so adamant to call them the ultimate environments not only because they include/are better text editors than everything else in the market, but because they're expandable, mature, and portable. And let's not even get into the part that relates to working on a remote server through a terminal emulator.

If you get ONE thing out of both the GP and my response today - let it be this: you say that vim is not the "ultimate editor" for you because it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement (being a power tool according to you)... Well, I'm pretty sure the primary requirement of each and every competent hacker regarding editors and IDE's should be to make the edition and creation of text easy, fast, streamlined, and efficient. I can count the text editors that fulfill that requirement to the T in a hand. Hell, there's three (or four if you dislike being productive). And one of them doesn't have a term version.

4) There are a few very specific tools/toolsets for very specific tasks in the programming world that make more sense to use than the classic "hardcore" editors. Hell in some cases they aren't necessarily better, but are obligatory! Nevertheless it doesn't change the fact that having either vim or emacs as tools in your bat-belt, will indelibly make a more productive developer by a factor of a quattuordecillion and one internet kittens.

5) I'm going to go ahead and make a generalization just as you did. "People who claim that vim/emacs are not the ultimate environment typically have a very naive world-view in my experience. Oh and in 98.64656% of the time (cause internet statistics are just as bad as generalizations) such claims come from people that failed to achieve proficiency in the aforementioned editors."

Notwithstanding the foregoing, I don't think you're bad for disliking vim, and I can totally understand that personal preference, biases, opinions, and memories will dictate what editor you end up using. But pissing a bunch of geeks that love the editors in questions with a comment that sounds biggot-ish, elitist (as elitist as the people you're confronting), and egocentric, makes very little sense if you ask me.

If you don't trust such methods of installation, you don't have to use them. Also, you can always look at the source of the script if you don't trust said method and choose for if you want to install by hand, use the script, or just don't use the tool at all. You really can't fault Yeoman because they want to make it easy and painless to install their tool.

For the people that want to check out the script:

https://raw.github.com/yeoman/yeoman/master/setup/install.sh

My solution to having to choose what to wear was very simple. When I got a little extra cash I reinvented my wardrobe using slacks and shirts (3 suits also, but that's for special occasions that require them). The trick was to get clothes that mainly can be worn interchangeably. Now I just grab a pair of slacks, a random shirt and I'm sure it'll look good because I spent the time to actually analyze my wardrobe woes when buying all the clothes.

On the weekends I just grab a tshirt and a pair of jeans at random, just like teenagers that are uninterested in making fashion statements. Just like the college student with 4 tshirts and 1 jeans that doesn't care about what he's wearing. Just like I do on the weekdays with my more "serious" clothes.

ALSO, people you can't mock the turtleneck thing. Even the top secret spys do it. Tactical turtlenecks anyone?

I would have thought the main point was the email not the documentary which is why I gave it a title referring to the email, not the documentary... C'est la vie.