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nimnio

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The paper you're citing investigates the idea that "early childhood investments have significantly higher benefit cost ratios than those targeted at older age group", and it concludes that "there may in fact be no relationship between program cost effectiveness and the age of the recipient."

From this you seem to have drawn the surprising conclusion that there is no benefit to greater in investment in early childhood education, a conclusion which the paper you're citing specifically warns against:

This finding does not imply that there should be less investment in early childhood programs. There are many early interventions that have large positive rates of return, and there are powerful equity reasons for investment in children.

The data shows that prevention can be cost effective, but in addition, later treatment and amelioration using evidenced based programs can also succeed.

More developers are coding in Windows than any other operating system -- almost more than Mac and Linux combined. The Hacker News filter bubble might lead us to believe otherwise.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

Windows 47.5%

MacOS 26.8%

Linux-based 25.6%

BSD 0.1%

87,851 responses

(The Stack Overflow survey is a poor representation of the entire development community, but it's worth something, maybe the best we have.)

Thinkpad X210 7 years ago

Most people will categorize crashing, overheating, and graphical artifacts as a more severe problem than "what's that small noise I hear once in a while".

Well, that would depend on whether it's really "absurd" or not; maybe it's effective. You put on glasses, people think you're smart. You wear an expensive watch, people think you're successful -- "nothing succeeds like success", "dress for the job you want", "talk the talk, walk the walk", and so on.

I only read page one of that link (thanks for sharing), but it appears to limit its scope to a specific scenario: given a lump sump of money (a windfall), it is it better to invest all at once or dollar cost average over a period of time? It is not recommending against dollar cost averaging in general; it is recommending against it for windfalls. Diversification is also not mentioned in the article.

Brave is not fooled either, which is interesting because it's based on Chromium.

Brave 0.14.1 libchromiumcontent 57.0.2987.133

Fixed in Chrome 58, so I wonder what the significant difference is.

Julie Rubicon 10 years ago

I realized it was fake in the first paragraph thanks to the cheesy, melodramatic hook:

"The last thing I want to do is write this down, but I’m doing it anyway, partially because people ought to know what’s happening with the things they post here, but mainly (like 99%) because of Julie Rubicon and the spike."

Oh, I've just discovered a world changing dark secret brewing in the heart of Facebook. I'd better tell the world! But first I must build some... suspense!

If it had turned out to be real, I'd thank the whistleblower right after I slapped them for being a twit.

Proselint 10 years ago

According to some definitions, AI is just "the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages." So by some definitions, a linter is absolutely an AI.

Semantics aside, it's not important to slm_HN's point. We can call it an AI, an algorithm, or just a computer, and in any case it's still possible for it to find errors beyond spelling ones.

"... there is a small part of me that enjoys playing Mr. Party Pooper when I see a mob of enthusiastic programmers trying to tie down some great cultural Gulliver with a thousand tiny little automated, black-and-white rules."

I'd reexamine that part, if I were you. I suspect it may be bigger than you think it is, especially since you've already pigeonholed the creators.

I don't think anyone is questioning whether your work resonates with a whole subset of people; I think we're questioning whether conferences and a full inbox are all the evidence we need to accept broad pronouncements about the state of an industry.

Texter 10 years ago

One of his domains is tomsdog.com. I don't know how much he paid for it, but I can get donsdog.com for about $10 a year. The list kaismh posted has 75 items in it, so say $750 a year.

The way I like to think about this is that if his after-tax income is $50,000, he is spending 1.5% of his income on domain names.

"More significantly in this particular case, various studies over the years have not supported the claim that short functions have better error rates, nor that longer but otherwise reasonable functions have higher error rates; if anything, the overall body of evidence seems to suggest the opposite conclusion."

That's an oversimplification of the research, and misleading. After citing five studies in Code Complete (including the one that shows an inverse correlation between errors and function size), McConnell summarizes as follows:

"That said, if you want to write routines longer than about 200 lines, be careful. None of the studies that reported decreased cost, decreased error rates, or both with larger routines distinguished among sizes larger than 200 lines, and you’re bound to run into an upper limit of understandability as you pass 200 lines of code."

I wouldn't advocate for a strictly short functions either, but the overall body of evidence definitely does _not_ suggest the opposite conclusion: the opposite conclusion would be that we should endeavour to write long functions!

Anyhow, nitpicking aside, thanks for providing a quick review of this book. I'm going to skip it based on your comments.

While I understand that it's tempting to blame celebs and young people for the lack of agreement you're finding here, it could also just be that smart, reasonable people find your unfounded beliefs petty and cynical. It's a possibility we shouldn't discount.

Hackpad source code 11 years ago

You should give https://sandstorm.io/ a close look. I would describe it as a personal server platform. You can host it yourself or use a cloud provider. You can install ported apps or write your own. I'm using the cloud beta right now, and it's really cool. They claim that porting apps to Sandstorm is pretty easy, and I think their live demo proves them right: there are some useful apps ported already (https://sandstorm.io/apps/).

From a certain perspective, you just paraphrased the quote you disagreed with:

Him: "If the reviewer makes a suggestion, and I don't have a clear answer as to why the suggestion should not be implemented, I'll usually make the change."

You: "[Do] not act as a blocker for code reviews unless it's absolutely necessary."

I think these express essentially the same philosophy, with some slight differences in the particulars.