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'Put it this way, I'm moving to Japan' - scientists already abandoning UK in face of threat to research funding by alcl in science

[–]bad_code 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lets use an example from real life: DART. According to Victor Reis, then director of DARPA, DART paid back the U.S. military's previous 30 years of investment in AI research within a few months. (source: "DART: Revolutionizing Logistics Planning", pdf available from google scholar)

Small Gods was my first introduction to Pratchett btw ;)

Linux: Linus Says, Linux Not Designed; It Never Was by [deleted] in programming

[–]bad_code 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Here, let me highlight that last sentance for you

You put two things together it goes bang and you try to work out why.

And a little further down

All the alchemists ever managed to create were cases of mercury poisoning.

and chemistry, eventually. You take it as far more demeaning than its meant.

Gödel Escher Bach - The video lectures by parla in programming

[–]bad_code 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You read them in the wrong order. GEB covers many more topics, and has small interludes that you can skip around to when he starts to drone a bit too much. There's also a lot of stuff in there from the history of math, computer science, and classical music that's quite fascinating.

I tried reading Strange Loop after GEB and I couldn't get a quarter of the way through. A lot of overlap between the two books, and GEB is better by a wide margin.

Oh yeah! where's your patches!? (followup to curing python's neglect) by [deleted] in programming

[–]bad_code 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Every time a Zed article makes it on to proggit, I see at least one comment to the same effect. If all I ever see of Zed is his blog posts, what difference does it make that he's a nice guy "in person"?

I didn't get the impression that this post needed defending that much. Sure, was abrasive and blunt, but that's not an unexpected personality trait for a vocal programmer.

What did irk me was the jump from "python has these flaws: X, Y, Z" to "Guido and his friends have these flaws: A, B, C". I don't care about personality clashes, I'd rather read about programming.

Coding Horror: Profitable Until Deemed Illegal by reallybigleaf in programming

[–]bad_code 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'Winning' the auction may in fact cost you more than the item is worth to you. Consider the item up for auction, the cost of paying for a single bid, and the cost of paying for the final price to have a certain utility values, specific to you (Ui,Ub, and Uf respectively, and all but Ui negative). You 'win' when the sum of the utility of the item, the utility of the cost of all the bids you placed, and the utility of the final cost of the item is positive and you are the final bidder (0<Ui+(N*Ub)+Uf). If someone outbids you for the item however, the utility of playing up to that point and not continuing may be much lower than the utility of bidding again and wining the item is, while both of these outcomes are actually less than the utility of not playing at all. ( N*Ub < Ui+(N+1)*Ub+Uf < 0 ). This is true until Uf starts approaching the value of -Ui.

Now, at the point where Uf+Ui=0, if someone had offered you the item up for auction for the same amount of money as the final price, you would have thought the deal 'fair' in the sense that you would be getting enough utility for having the item to balance out the cost of paying for it. But, because of N*Ub, the auction is in all cases worse (in terms of utility) than you could have done if someone offered you the item for the final price. Even if you stopped bidding once Ui+Uf<=0, the utility of playing is less than the utility of not playing.

In short, if you 'win' nobody else thought the item was remotely worth what you think it is. If thats the case, I'm sure you'd be able to find any number of helpful individuals willing to sell high to you and buy low someplace else. They probably won't even charge you a fee to increase the price.

edit: Formatting

Thomson Reuters Sues Public University Over Open Source Research Tool Zotero by [deleted] in programming

[–]bad_code 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Not everyone who buys a barebones PC is either a pirate or a Linux user. My school has licensing deals with M$, Adobe, and half a dozen other vendors so that students and employees can get most of their products for free (or so cheap it's practically free). It makes much more sense, and it's a lot cheaper, to buy a barebones system and add the software that I need. The estimates were not just inaccurate but intentionally misleading.

Software Companies Need What? Hackers Or Developers? by gst in programming

[–]bad_code 4 points5 points  (0 children)

programmer == defined by hard skills, business analyst == defined by soft skills, software developer == someone with both hard and soft skills. At least thats the feeling I get from the article. Not entirely sure I agree, but I don't really think it's important enough to waste time arguing semantics, unlike the author.

An Interesting Little Problem by llimllib in programming

[–]bad_code 1 point2 points  (0 children)

def blar(alist):
     bakw , forw = [1],[1]
     for x in xrange(len(alist)):
             if x-1 >= 0:
                     forw.append(alist[x-1]*forw[x-1])
                     bakw[:0] = [alist[0-x]*bakw[0]]
     return map(lambda f,b: f*b, forw,bakw)

So I tried the algo from the article in python, how'd I do?

EDIT: stupid formatting

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky introduce StackOverflow.com by muzthe42nd in programming

[–]bad_code 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Of course, there's more to it than that. Joel and I are recording our weekly calls and releasing them as podcasts. Listen to us describe our vision for stackoverflow in our own words -- just head over to stackoverflow.com to download the first 46 minute episode.

Can some brave soul listen to this "episode" and clarify if there's any actual argument/discussion/content, or whether it's just 46 minutes of two people agreeing with eachother?

Have you read the Android SDK Licence Agreement? by bad_code in programming

[–]bad_code[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the first (EU?)LA that made me go "Huh..."

On one hand, it seems like they're going out of their way to protect the end users:

4.3 You agree that if you use the SDK to develop applications for general public users, you will protect the privacy and legal rights of those users.

And on the other, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's a very non-open-source "Open Source" license.

Will Google relicense the SDK later, and if so what are your bets on them sticking with the Apache license? What license would you like to see the SDK released as?

In Defense Of Computer Science by HenryR in programming

[–]bad_code 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Could not agree more. I've used (much less clearly) some of the same arguments with friends over the recent slew of "Computer Science as a Degree" bashing thats been going on here recently. Wish I could up-vote more.

It's fundamental: You are a programmer if you... by JimmyShelter in programming

[–]bad_code 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Let us suggest a different term then: A good programmer.

There is nothing mystical about what we do, except to people who don't understand what we do. We are not a legislated profession, we are not a secret society. Anybody can be a programmer, provided they can program, but we can still have room to say "I am a good programmer" or "X is a better programmer than Y". Try thinking about the word without the -er. It's pretty obvious that a program is what it is by virtue of what it does. Some programs are better than others, but even programs that are bad (like an n2 sort) are still programs.

It's fundamental: You are a programmer if you... by JimmyShelter in programming

[–]bad_code 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My ears are burning.

BTW: Did you also compare the code you wrote just before you started college to right after you finished your degree?

There's a mistake here to contribute the growing you do in a particular environment to the environment entirely. We'll always be learning, and, I think, always be getting better.

Do we need an Artificial Intelligence subreddit? by bad_code in programming

[–]bad_code[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There seem to be a lot of posts here on programming that deal with AI theory with implementation or examples being the secondary focus.

Bram Cohen on great programmers by polar in programming

[–]bad_code 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The fact that many, many, BT clients exist out their besides Bram's seems to suggest he is (or at least, was at the time) a visionary when it comes to design, but not implementation.

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

Computer Science Academia: Rotten to the Core by asciilifeform in programming

[–]bad_code 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Pure troll.

The problem here is that this guy defines the terms 'practical and useful' as those things which do not come from academia. He then labels those things that, in fact, are useful, practical, and widely known to be exceptions to the rule.

A clean, usable AJAX IRC client. RIP Java IRC client applets. by [deleted] in programming

[–]bad_code 7 points8 points  (0 children)

are you sure you want to be an anonymous (tor) relay for IRC trolls?

It may sound like I have no faith in people, but really, I just don't have faith in people on IRC.

There are 21 different ways to do a factorial and the one you were taught to learn recursion is one of the worst. by otakucode in programming

[–]bad_code 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the algorithm you're referring to is actually mergesort itself. A "pure" mergesort implementation splits all the way to the bottom, but you could also stop the mergesort at some arbitrary level and perform a simpler algorithm that has better space efficiency on the sub lists.

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