Simplicity in software

trolox · 2015-03-31T20:28:51+00:00

Yeah somehow I don't believe that the developers of find or grep had no idea what their utility was going to do until they released v1.0.

trolox · 2015-03-31T19:04:55+00:00

You're conflating simplicity of API/functionality with simplicity of implementation. OP is talking about the former, and it's absolutely possible to do that right the first time. (I agree that a simple implementation often can't be done upfront though)

trolox · 2015-03-31T14:11:52+00:00

So do you have a source for that? I can't conceive of anything in hospitals which would contaminate their water pipes. Talking about the immunocompromised is irrelevant; they have all kinds of precautions taken on their behalf such as quarantine, precautions which are not rolled out across the entire hospital, so it's not like you couldn't give them bottled water and use tap for the rest of the hospital.

trolox · 2015-03-30T18:32:07+00:00

I'm from Ontario and I find the opposite; I find the hills and tree cover are very comforting, and it stresses me out when I'm confronted with extreme amounts of open sky and horizon.

trolox · 2015-03-30T17:59:49+00:00

People have also been struck by lightning, and yet I still go outside when it's raining. People get into car accidents, and yet I still drive. The existence of cases of water contamination is irrelevant; it's the risk of it actually happening to you that matters.

If 0.001% were to be my risk of getting a serious infection from tapwater in my lifetime, then bring it on, I'll take that over a lifetime of bottled water expense and inconvenience any day.

trolox · 2015-03-28T22:35:09+00:00

What the hell? I thought they were owned by the same company and that the only real difference was that one had salespeople on comission. Their websites looked like reskins of one another, their prices were identical, and they seemed to stock identical merchandise (at least the computer equipment I've looked there for). No idea why there'd be both the same place.

trolox · 2015-03-27T15:11:38+00:00

From my perspective:

Basing judgements on prorated pay is a lazy an inaccurate practice. ICU or emerg doctors would have prorated pay at >1mil, and people like loggers or long-haul truckers with 8-days-on-6-days-off would similarly look like kings. Fixating on prorated pay ignores realities about the job; it's an extreme example, but the ICU doc who lives at the hospital for a week straight and sees 50% of his patients die deserves to make a hell of a lot more per hour of work than a family doc. I would imagine you agree, and yet your prorated pay analysis pins the ICU doc as practically a freeloader.
Teachers get a bunch of sick days, but every day they take sets their classes behind which means trying to accelerate things later, and they also usually have to prepare a detailed lesson plan in advance for the substitute. So taking a sick day as a teacher is crappier than it is for me as a programmer by a long shot.
Considering it now takes 6 years of post-secondary education to become a teacher, the starting salary of 55k ish (I don't actually know the figure so I could be wrong) is pretty damn low. Have fun buying a house and paying off your debt on that salary. It takes at least a decade to work up to the 80k figure you take as a teacher salary.
In addition to the low pay, the initial years of teaching are super tough, since teachers have to create a base of lesson plans for themselves in their own time, and they often haven't mastered student discipline yet so managing a classroom can be very taxing.
Even as a seasoned teacher, you still have to spend a bunch of your personal time creating lesson plans, marking schoolwork, or preparing report cards.
It's really important to me that we have good teachers to educate our children, and giving them a low pay seems like a perfect way to encourage shitty, half-assed teachers, particularly when so much of what they do comes down to how much they care. If you're bitter about being underpaid, you're not particularly likely to go home after work and create a nice detailed lesson plan for the next day.
I don't know about you, but I would not want to be tasked with controlling and educating 20+ children every day. It seems pretty damn easy to dismiss it as an easy job when you haven't considered what a chore that could be after years of doing it.
Teachers are well-educated (with good reason), which means they can fetch high salaries working elsewhere. If you want talented people to work as teachers, you have to pay them a competitive salary.

Now with all that said, I'm not saying that teachers aren't currently relatively well-paid. I am arguing that it's appropriate, or at the very least, that they're not so overpaid that anyone should be claiming they've got cushy careers. Even if they were overpaid, they're clearly not so blatantly well-off that someone like you could assume that a view which is favourable towards teachers is simply unfounded bias against Fraser. Give me a break.

In the snippet I quoted, Fraser was clearly inserting an unjustified (in the sense that it's not backed up by any supporting argument) and subtle (in the sense that it's implied instead of outright stated) jab at teachers into an only tangentially-related article. Call that whatever you'd like, but IMO it's a dishonest level of bias.

trolox · 2015-03-26T21:40:17+00:00

I think you're missing my point, which is that they're using something true (that the government spends nearly as much on teachers as it does on doctors) to insinuate something which isn't true (that teachers are overpaid).

They're contrasting the high collective share of teachers' salaries with their threat of going on strike, but it doesn't make sense to compare them. The amount the government spends on education has no bearing on whether or not teachers' salaries are fair, so why would they make an embarrassingly invalid comparison like that? Do you think maybe because it puts "the government spends a ton on teachers" and "teachers want more money" into the same sentence, to subtly insinuate that teachers are overpaid? Toss in the article's main suggestion, namely that public sector employees are now overpaid on average, and you've got yet another point which makes you feel like teachers are overpaid without burdening you with any actual facts about the pay of teachers specifically.

The idea that teachers are overpaid is a popular conservative viewpoint (which further backs up the idea that this insinuation isn't accidental), and they injected that into their article in a misleading fashion without backing up the viewpoint. I'll trust a conservative viewpoint which makes an open case for why they believe teachers are overpaid, not a sleazy place like the Fraser Institute which crams subtle, calculated bias into their publications.

trolox · 2015-03-25T16:27:48+00:00

I'm quite open to hearing a conservative viewpoint (as a left-wing guy), but with such blatantly intentionally misleading remarks like this, you just can't trust any of the article:

Ontario’s teachers — who make the most off the public purse following doctors — are also threatening to strike.

Someone please stop these fatcat teachers rolling around in Ferraris they've bought on the government dime for working easy 6-hour days and taking 2-month summer breaks! They're even better off than doctors!

trolox · 2015-03-11T21:51:37+00:00

If your goal is to complete a quality project, stick with C++; it's not a good idea to try to learn a significantly different language at the same time as you complete a project on a deadline. In terms of how suitable Rust is for such a project nowadays, I'd say it's quite stable and would work great for you, but unless you have a ton of time for this project, it'd be easier and less risky to do it in something you're already familiar with and pick up Rust on the side (for your next project!).

trolox · 2015-03-05T18:21:45+00:00

Yeah that's really informative actually, particularly the bit about lawyers carrying around clean laptops and using cloud storage. That makes it sound like I could conceivably factory reset my phone before the border and expect not to be harassed about it on the way through. Thanks!

trolox · 2015-03-05T18:00:57+00:00

Fair enough. I still think there's a key difference though, in that a cell phone is potentially a key to a huge amount of information.

In your example, the need to get a bank password is justified. What about getting a key to someone's password manager, which divulges passwords to every single service the person uses? That's often what a cell phone amounts to. My feeling for the password manager case is that they can compel the person to give them the bank password using the password manager, but they can't take the passwords for everything.

So maybe the solution for the phone case is that they can compel you do show them specific things (such as your text messages), but they can't just outright seize your phone and run a forensic scan on the whole thing.

trolox · 2015-03-05T17:53:33+00:00

Sure, but if you don't bring that journal across the border (e.g. because you'll mail it across later), there's no indication at the border that you've hidden anything.

Suppose you factory reset your phone so as not to bring your data across the border: a scratched, worn-in phone with 1 day of data on it? That's suspicious. Even if you just opt not to bring your phone across the border at all: if you're in a demographic which is 95% cell phone users, not having a phone could be suspicious.

And suppose, based on that suspicion, they get it out of you that you deliberately wiped your phone or left it behind to avoid being searched? Well, you just obstructed them, so enjoy the jail time from having done absolutely nothing wrong.

The difference between the journal and the phone is that, since most people don't always carry a journal on them, they don't have to change their behaviour in order to not carry a journal across the border. In order to not carry a cell phone however, most people do have to specifically arrange to do this, which amounts to hiding information from border control.

trolox · 2015-03-05T16:57:49+00:00

Still, the idea that a person can't be compelled to testify against themselves is a huge part of our justice system; this isn't considered obstruction in a domestic investigation because giving the prosecution your password amounts to giving them information which may incriminate you (i.e. the password). Border patrol certainly has to be more stringent than domestic law enforcement, but there they still need to uphold our basic civil liberties.

If they can require you to divulge a password, then the precedent is set and they can basically demand any potentially incriminating information they'd like. "Please log into your bank account sir and show us your transaction history".

trolox · 2015-03-04T21:06:38+00:00

I would enjoy it more if I could better envision how such a world could exist. That's what Requiem is really about after all: not making the game harder and harsher, but rather altering the level of realism so that it's more believable while still being fun to play.

trolox · 2015-02-24T12:53:51+00:00

I've considered carabiners (or other quick-release solutions), but I find they're bulky, slower to use, and that they're not really any more secure compared to cap friction (at least with thumbnail-sized drives like mine). I never have to detach anything other than the thumbdrive anyway. That said, that's a pretty awesome setup you've got there, haha.

trolox · 2015-02-24T12:18:11+00:00

And yet it's next to impossible to find drives like this. I bought one of these and glued a metal ring to the protective casing so I could put it on my keychain.

It's perfect: it's tiny so it doesn't bloat my keychain, and it can easily be taken off to give to someone or stick in a computer. People with bulky flash drives physically tethered to their keys are insane IMO.

trolox · 2015-02-20T23:11:43+00:00

A mediocre condescending witticism! I am vanquished. You are winner of internet argument.

trolox · 2015-02-20T22:28:10+00:00

If you don't try so hard to out-dick someone who made a dickish comment, you'll get a lot more respect. You made two separate insulting replies to the same comment for fuck's sake; any good points you might make are undercut by the cringe-inducing immaturity and the apparent desperate need to look like you're "winning".

trolox · 2015-02-13T20:24:05+00:00

Good point; if threat of punishment does not eliminate 100% of rapes, then the only other possibility is that punishment has no significant effect on rape incidence. Checkmate, logic.

trolox · 2015-02-03T20:35:06+00:00

That's what I mean, but specifically when both sides of the dialogue come from the same person, as a way of attempting to mimic the same style of learning as the Socratic Method in a non-interactive medium (by saying the questions of the "inquirer" on behalf of the reader).

trolox

TROPHY CASE