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torial

342 karma · joined April 29, 2009

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torial··on The Great Benefit of Test Driven Development Nobody Talks About
I'd take the imperfect studies listed in the article I provided over two anecdotes. However, for the scenario of using TDD with the Sudoku, where it was done with less chaos, other anecdotes are there: http://johannesbrodwall.com/2010/04/06/why-tdd-makes-a-lot-o...

I say this as a person who likes Norvig more than I like TDD (I'm interested in TDD to see if it is useful for my day to day work, Norvig is more of my high level guilty pleasure, such as his spell checker article or his speech on using lots of data and then algorithm becomes less important)

torial··on The Great Benefit of Test Driven Development Nobody Talks About
I've been following the TDD stuff as an outsider, and hands down the article that makes me consider it with the least skepticism is this one: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/07/tdd-derange...

I'm sure there are issues w/ the various studies it cites, but it is the only one to actually address TDD from a productivity standpoint with some research data that I've seen. (More / better links welcome too!)

torial··on The best patent ever
I think the problem with that is prior art has already been established :-/
torial··on Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread problem
What you want is fish oil capsules with "enteric" coating. That gets rid of the fish burps.

Agreed, I tried downing some fish oil by spoon (which was lemon flavored as well) and could do it longer than 5 days.

torial··on Date of First Known Human Tool Use Pushed Back 800,000 years
This image popped in my head when I saw your comment:

Makeshift hammer hits toe, ancient man yells "Owww". Everyone around him knew what he meant. He points at hammer, says "Gru", and his toe "uf", and voila, everyone that was around him now has a vocabulary of 3 words :-) Then it expands with pointing....

torial··on Are your beliefs consistent? Take the test...
Just worth highlighting this (as a lot of discussion seems to be on the bullets and contradictions):

Rules of the game

The aim of the game is to get across the intellectual battleground unscathed. There are two types of injury you can suffer.

A direct hit occurs when you answer in a way which implies a logical contradiction. We have been very careful to make sure that only strict contradictions result in a direct hit. However, we do make two caveats.

First, because you only have choices between pre-selected and carefully worded statements, you might find that you have taken a direct hit because the statement closest to your own conviction leads into a contradiction. However, had you phrased the statement yourself, you may have been able to avoid the contradiction while expressing a very similar belief.

Such possibilities are unavoidable given the constraints on the game. We merely ask that you do not take it personally if you suffer a direct hit and don't get too frustrated if the choices we offer you sometimes seem to force you into a choice you'd rather not make.

You have to bite a bullet if your choices have an implication that most would find strange, incredible or unpalatable. There is more room for disagreement here, since what strikes many people as extraordinary or bizarre can strike others as normal. So, again, please do not get too upset if we judge you have bitten a bullet. Maybe it is our world-view which is warped!

torial··on The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave
That was an excellent quote.

I also found this to be a great quote: "My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends."

torial··on Ask HN: Why choose a dynamically typed language?
Short Answer: Python idioms are intuitive to me, whereas many statically typed idioms are not -- so it is easier for me to learn new concepts using Python.

Long Answer: For me, part of it is syntax. I have found that using Python has enabled me to learn some programming concepts that I struggled with in .Net. .Net supported them just fine, but somehow the Python approach was intuitive for me, so once I learned it, I could abstract it to a different language. Polymorphism being the primary example with Python.

More recently, I've gravitated toward languages that provide support with both dynamic types and static types (and arguably C# has heavily moved in that direction, but still I find the syntax not intuitive). The hybrid is nice, as you can worry about the higher level algorithm more easily with the dynamic feature, and then shift over to static to take advantage of the features you cite for static.

Earlier this year, I discovered the Cobra language (http://www.cobra-language.com), which boasts a python-like syntax on top of .Net (and supports both dynamic/static typing), and is optionally more strict than standard static typed languages in that it adds the benefits of contracts, nil-checking, and embedded unit tests.

torial··on Your Code Sucks
Oh, I don't know. When I've encountered code that I say sucks, it was for code that had single letters as variables in massive function, didn't believe in breaking logic into discrete functions (this was primarily in VB/ASP, so it wasn't for perf reasons ;-)), used copy and paste all the time for large amounts of code (and since they didn't use discrete functions, lost out on simple abstractions), etc...
torial··on How great artists have fought creative block
The TED talk was far better than the BBC article. Thanks for the link.
torial··on Now legal in the U.S.: Jailbreaking your iPhone, ripping a DVD for education
For some of these, I've found if Disc Menu on the remote doesn't work, then fast forwarding does. But it isn't 100%. There are some DVDs which are truly a pain :-/
torial··on Veracity, SourceGear's new, enterprise-friendly DVCS, is out
The best part of the FAQ was:

A tarball and a mailing list? Really? Aren’t you going to have some kind Web 2.0 "Veracity Overfow" thingie? Veracity’s web presence will have more of the modern menities later. The Veracity server needs more testing before we set up a public instance of the repo.

torial··on User Interface Design Pattern Library
Is there access to the info w/o registration? If so can you point me to it?
torial··on Veracity: The next step in DVCS
If it is fossil with an easy to use interface that would be a definite value-add!
torial··on Ruby and .Net Developers solve two different kinds of problems
If IDE is your primary hang up -- go with IronPython, which has integration into VS.Net : http://www.ironpython.net/tools/ (including intellisense).
torial··on Sorting algorithm visualisation (nice)
Do you keep a master reference of topics and links? Or are you getting this list by searching. One of the above links has references by you to the bottom two as well...
torial··on The next wave of programming languages
Cobra (http://cobra-language.com/), a python derivative that also an up and coming language. Love the syntax refinements, the built in unit-testing, contracts, etc... all around a great language.
torial··on Ask HN: What movies inspire you?
Henry V (Branagh version : to do battle w/ code)

Glory (if feeling overwhelmed but need to do the right thing)

Searching for Bobby Fisher (inspires creativity)

torial··on Computer automatically deciphers ancient language
For more details the research article: http://people.csail.mit.edu/bsnyder/papers/bsnyder_acl2010.p...
torial··on Why I Use Fossil
When I was evaluating Fossil about 1 year ago, compared to git and mercurial -- one of the requirements for my company was that it support large files. All of them supported large repositories, but easily ran into issues at about 10 MB for git and mercurial. Large file support for mercurial could be patched or extended but not in an ideal fashion. Fossil was able to handle files up to about 700 MBs in my tests before puking. I should add, those weren't binary files -- but large XML files.
torial··on Wind-Powered Car Travels Downwind Faster Than The Wind
There is another video from the same series that is more impressive, with the treadmill going fast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xL8gRJ5F6k&feature=relat...
torial··on Why morality doesn't need God
For an example of healing, from wikipedia:

"The adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. urged the church to provide for the poor, sick, widows, and strangers. It ordered the construction of a hospital in every cathedral town. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil, bishop of Caesarea. The latter was attached to a monastery and provided lodgings for poor and travelers, as well as treating the sick and infirm. There was a separate section for lepers.[15]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital

torial··on Skype Screen Sharing Is A Huge (And Free) Productivity Tool
The only drawback that I think should be mentioned w/ Teamviewer is that it is only free for non-commercial use. As a RDP replacement it is awesome -- a friend and I troubleshoot problems that way sometimes. But it isn't free for those that would use it in a professional capacity.
torial··on Worst-Case Thinking
I don't know -- two of the jobs I had were right next to a bus depot. It was actually a risk :-D
torial··on Pretty girls may cause myopathy, diabetes, hypertension and impotency
Wow, I didn't see any of those terms implied in the article. Sweaty palms, heightened cortisol -- sure. The title is plain misleading.
torial··on Patterns in Python
Looks like decorators were after the article was written:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/

E.g. 2/28/2003 vs 6/5/2003

torial··on Patterns in Python
At the very bottom:

View document source. Generated on: 2003-02-28 11:59 UTC.

I was thinking I'd seen this before -- a long time ago. How much still applies?

torial··on Academia and the decline of wealth in America
I couldn't find the sentence you were referring to in either article. In particular I searched for "secret" and "the secret".

The essay from the OP seems to be what you are talking about wrt innovation. The FiveThirtyEight link provided in the immediately parent post to yours doesn't mention innovation.

torial··on SciDB - A Science-Oriented DBMS at 100 Petabytes
You might find this interesting: http://lists.scidb.org/archive/scidb-news/2010-January/msg00... - about the corporate sponsor who will make an enterprise version.

Anyways, I went to the site hoping to find a nice lead, but they've got the developers list private, and it seems that access to a real system is locked down.

I'd say it seems less like vaporware to me, but I'd have to say that while they say the codebase is GPL (or course, where is the proof for that?), the development process is extremely closed. It doesn't have the feel of any open source project I've ever seen.

torial··on Steve Jobs “Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone”
This seems to be a smart movie on Jobs' part. I'm not an Apple fan per se (I don't own any Apple products) but can see some definite advantages to Jobs' strategy.

1. Every business guy I've talked to loved the iPhone's power and what they could do without needing to lug a laptop around everywhere. So the iPhone has a definite business appeal, and keeping porn out helps keep that ambiance. 2. Clearly he is using the porn store for Android as a, "hey, Android is entertainment, iPhone is for professionals " type of message. 3. I think the other smart thing, which no one in Apple will talk about is the reduced bandwidth consumption they will have by not having porn! It is an inherently bandwidth hungry system (presuming online, not stored in a DB) to be encouraging videos and images. 3a) This allows them to leave out a strategically bad (PR/Marketing-wise) niche that would strain an already strained infrastructure. 3b) This strain on the infrastructure would affect those business types that they have good appeal with.

FWIW - I think people claiming that Apple is socially conservative is absurd. They have a former VP candidate for the Democratic party on their board. And I bet if people looked into it, they'd find a health balance of board political donations go to liberals.

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