alien_at_work

I view 'imply' as 'suggest' and 'prove' is 'this is a fact'. Correlation does in fact imply causation (which is why correlations are investigated). It just doesn't prove the causation. It may be that the two things you're looking at are both related to some other cause (e.g. ice cream sales and murders increase in summer, supposedly. This does not mean ice cream sales has a direct relation to murder but they probably both have a relation to outside tempature), it may even be pure coincidence. But if you see a correlation you see a place to begin your investigations.

Except that's not right. It may be. In fact persuing correlations is how we do science. At some point we gain enough confidence in the correlations that we call it causation.

Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.

Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.

never seek out advice from reliable resources.

What reliable resources would those be? Poorly defined, crap studies done by people who've never had children and the study was never independantly reproduced by anyone?

In the beginning, pain is the only means of communication (although we didn't actually spank, a little tug on the side burns did the trick). In my experience, once a child is old enough to understand time-based punishment (e.g. you don't get to watch TV tomorrow) a little and what it will mean, that becomes more effective.

Some of those are so bad as to be straight up dangerous (e.g. r/fitness).

Posts like this seem so dishonest. The entire point of shilling would be hiding the fact that your shilling (otherwise you'd buy an ad), so of course we don't have deep documentation of exactly who is shilling when, where, how much they're paid, etc.

What we do have is the knowledge of companies/groups dedicated to "influencing online opinion" (e.g. Correct the record, Share Blue, etc.). They don't advertise what they're doing but there somewhere doing influencing. Seems reasonable that they'd be on the biggest social sites doing their work.

What I've personally seen as very obvious shilling is GMO related topics on reddit (regardless of where you stand on the issue). You can be on the most obscure sub you can find, and if anyone says something critical about GMO products there will be a rebutal post within a short time always using the exact same arguments, exact same articles, terminology, etc. When new variations of the defense are developed they are instantly deployed site wide. This is for sure an organized group of people. Are they paid for it? I'm not sure, but for the effort they put in I hope they don't do it for free.

If I had infinite time, it would be intesting to do some deep data analysis on the posts on reddit and try to figure out how many are coordinated.

let's say polite Elon Musk

Uh... where do you get this impression? My impression is that Musk easily fits in the same bucket as Ellison / Jobs / Bezos

Are you seriously trying to claim Snopes isn't biased? I would say that's the more outrageous claim here. If Snopes is absent of any bias, what is their methodology by which they achieve that? Here is someone [1] who tried to find out and could not.

And as far as bias, a quora post [2] seems to give the impression that Snopes was heavily favoring Hillary Clinton through the campaing.

So I'd like to turn this around: could those that believe Snopes is not biased give some kind of citation?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Is-Snopes-biased-Why-do-some-people-be...

They weren't voting between Trump and no one. The alternative was Hillary Clinton. For a conservative christian you'll have a hard time finding someone they'd be more scared of having as president.

Ugh. Is what happened so very difficult to understand? Chistians were faced with voting for someone they were generally not comfortable with vs. someone believed to be truly evil. Her husband votoed a bill to ban so named "partial birth abortion" and Hillary expressed support for late term abortions.

If you could get over your contempt for people who see things differently than you do and actually talk with some of them you might find that a lot of people were voting against Hillary instead of for Trump.

That's not fair. Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone. If you don't like what the people who actually voted picked, then try voting next time.

Funny enough, the creator of Perl's previously well known accomplishment was winning these contests pretty much any time he cared to join. Take that as you will.

and then clarify the question title to reflect the problem they need help with.

How many times have you seen that happen? Further that only occurs in an XY situation where the question was wrong. I've been hit by cases where the answer was "don't do that because it's bad". Well, I know that and I know why it's bad but I also know that I have to do it anyway. What now? You couldn't change the question in that case because they asked what they meant, they were just told that they were wrong (and they were).

I get really miffed when I see someone answering the literal question even when it is clear that the OP have a different problem

And I get just as miffed when they don't because of all the times I get burned by people behaving as you want and then I can't get that same answer answered and have to go through even more pain (it was painful enough to be forced into the situation) to figure it out for myself. I have basically no karma on SO because when I get some I use it to vote down such people.

Answering both X and Y is fine of course, and probably the preferred.

Here we can agree.

Again, you're assuming the question is "wrong". But how likely is it that every single person who asks that question is wrong? With your line of thinking you help the OP and anyone who gets in the exact same situation as the OP but no one who actually needs the answer to the question that was asked.

If you're worried about it then just answer exactly what was ask and follow your strategy. But please don't simply do your strategy because it's a real pain for those of us who end up having to move off the beaten path from time to time.

it is in my view completely useless if it doesn't solve the problem.

Well, this is exactly the problem I'm describing: you're trying to solve the problem for one user when the answer is for everyone who could ever ask something similar enough to come to the page from a search engine. So ignoring the question and solving the problem might help the OP but it doesn't help anyone else who actually needed to know how to replace a lamp. In fact it's hurt them because now "how to move a lamp" is considered solved by a lot of people but the actual page with the "solution" does not contain one.

In such cases where the OP and the community agrees, reformatting the question would avoid making a useless landing page.

And if the question is 10 years old the day I need to reformat my linux hard drive? The OP might not even still be alive. Certainly there will be resistance to rezzing a 10 year old thread to make the question more general.

since this is optimizing for a hypothetical future reader at the expense of the actual person having a problem

Which is fine because there are N potential future readers but only one OP.

It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking. You might, but you might not. The fact that SO serves as a collection of programming knowledge, you do not know better than everyone who will ever search for that question even if you do actually know better than the OP who actually asked the first time.

It would be fine to help with all these other possibilites but part of your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement.

No, this is unacceptable. Ideally you should first answer the question, then explain why it shouldn't be done. If you don't have enough time, then drop the second part.

And the reason is not about the OP, the OP is irrelevant in such a site. SO is a collection of programming knowledge. So the problem is that an experienced software engineer comes along years later, forced into doing something they already know is bad but have no choice for some reason (normally some silly job constrained that they simply cannot change), google search to see if anyone has done it and guess what comes up? The exact question on SO but with these useless answers. And since it has been "answered" no one else bothers any more. And I can't come in an clarify why I need it, it's not my question. If I ask again, my question will probably flagged as a duplicate.

If I could change only one thing on SO, it would be that anyone who answers "don't do that", in any form, without answering the question is banned from the site and their response removed.

Can you get an interest only loan on a home in the USA?

It's very simple: Unit tests test a specific "unit" (i.e. in an OO language, that's a class) and integration tests test the ingration of multiple units.

In OO languages, I personally prefer unit tests with all dependancies stubbed or mocked out to verify the interface of that specific unit or component.

Well, I think from Roy's point of view REST is only HATEOAS. So URL's are irrelevant; you can put version numbers in there if you want but no client should realize it.

What you should be versioning is your media types (e.g. HTML4 vs HTML5).

If the Golang team has had enough time to cherry pick the best ideas and lessons learned to build a language

Except where have they done that? They've had 40 years and their solution to the C binary function error code return problem was... to add a special way to return an error code. There have been superior solutions to this for 20 years at least.

How long have we known about the value of generics?

To me, the fact that they can't figure out how to solve this isn't remotely suprising.

Flagged. This comment is so awful, ignorant and offensive (especially to actual victims of sexual violence!). Wow, how on earth does someone come up with such a ludicrus, insane oppinion. Please learn what words (e.g. violence) mean before attempting to use them in conversation.

the entire discussion on QuickCheck is hard to really make sense of and arbitrary is a famously good use of type classes

I found it understandable but for me the issue was: all the problems that author pointed out are true but you're not forced to make an instance of Arbitrary. I rarely do in my tests. But some times it really does make sense and in those cases it's nice to have.

You only live once, personally I would pick the one that offers the most money. That way, if you find it boring you can always save up enough to live off of a year or two and then do your own thing.

What is your alternative here? Keep getting exploited and keep being frustrated? You need to consider yourself in, say, 20 years. Consider you decided to stay, how do you feel in 20 years? Consider you decided to try something else, how do you feel in 20 years now?

That's a pretty pro-Zuck view you have there. I think the courts are in a better position to decide and they found for the Winklevoss twins. Yes, they didn't get a lot of money but they got what they asked for.

You are not paid by the value you create, but by supply/demand for the position.

The labor market isn't the greatest place to talk about market forces. Companies do everything they legally (and illegally to an extent) can to ensure that it's not an efficient market. Further, companies have all the power in the relationship: most of us must have work but a company doesn't absolutely have to hire someone. I saw a 4-person startup on this site say they'd been looking for a "rockstar" for 2 years to expand their company. They were willing and able to wait 2 years for a highly skilled person willing to take a low enough salary. Not many people can wait 2 years to get a job.

To see what a real labor market would look like, you need to address the power balance. So I think sports teams are a better representation because they have unions to address this issue. And they do capture more of the value they produce (not all of it, obviously).

And your second statement is not true. You simply get cheaper workforce in other countries. Even on senior levels.

Oh, I had assumed you meant the typical outsourcing locations. If you mean places like Europe, yes you can get good senior people for lower rates there. But it's a percentage lower, not X times lower, you can't get a truly senior level person on e.g. 7k/yr. I'm sure there's someone somewhere that has, but they'd have done better to buy a lottery ticket with that luck.

Oh I see. Yes, I don't think SELinux could do exactly the scenario you decide because the things you're mentioning don't exist at the OS level. If you can figure out a way to make them something SELinux can get a context onto then it would be possible.

I don't see why senior dev salaries should go any higher

Because they're vastly underpaid compared to the value they produce.

At that point it would be easier to open office overseas even for smaller shops.

Which means you're getting junior devs, at best. The entire concept of outsourcing hangs on the idea that the people being outsourced to will behave exactly the opposite of those doing the outsourcing, i.e. not really caring about money. Well they do care: when they get senior they leave and go somewhere they can earn western money.