reality_czech

What they got right was shutting down.

If only AMP would do the same.

If none of the big tech companies will step up to adopt openssl, we should put it down, like in a real pet shelter.

If a project becomes inactive, Apache puts it into the Attic and development ceases.

I'm sitting here waiting for you to realize "unsecure" is not a word.

If Oracle gets its way, code smells will be copyrightable as well.

"Post-modern" C++? Finally someone admits that the language was all a huge prank.

The problem with traditional operator overloading is that you have to memorize which symbol corresponds to which magic method name.

That's not even in the top 5 problems with operator overloading.

How many years or decades will those "formalities" take? Java language enhancements have a history of taking much longer than originally claimed.

Almost certainly a shorter amount of time than it would take to migrate our codebase away from Java. Oracle has actually been moving pretty fast with Java recently, for better or worse.

[XML is...] Already moved into an optional library, being dropped entirely in the next version.

And this illustrates another problem: Scala is constantly breaking backwards compatibility. Which is a real-world problem, unlike "I want the latest gee-whiz language feature."

Put that together and you get a language where you never need the magical frameworks that (real-world) Java needs.

Scala has plenty of "magical frameworks": scalaz, akka, shapeless, the list goes on.

Newer Java libraries like Jackson don't need a type registry (or at least, not one that have to manually set up.)

I won't try to defend J2EE or Hibernate, but also, I don't use them.

I think he's getting downvoted because the Washington Post is, almost unquestionably, not a cult.

And with that simple statement of fact, "pacifist" has been "intellectually pantsed."

LOL.

Java has been gradually eating all the good parts of Scala. So far, it's eaten lambdas, map / reduce / fold functions, option types, raw string literals, the concept of a built-in REPL, type inference for local variables, and default methods in interfaces (which is kind of like mixins). Pattern matching and type classes are on the menu, but not yet formally merged into Java.

So what does Scala have left? Operator overloading, which tends to lead to unclear code. "Implicit," which should give any former C++ programmer PTSD flashbacks. A compiler which is pretty slow. The ability to embed XML into code (why?). A collections library which is nightmarishly complex. (See https://yz.mit.edu/wp/true-scala-complexity/ )

* The health plan is really expensive, since your co-workers' body parts keep falling off.

* The only thing the cafeteria serves is BRAAAAAAINS.

* Your noncompete agreement is still valid even after you die.

Aside from that, it's pretty similar to working at Google.

There are model airplane pilots, they have FAA regulations, they have a community that is very serious about education, training, mentor-peer relationships and self monitoring and reporting.

Right. And that community, the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) is probably doomed if these new rules pass. A lot of their models can go faster than 100 MPH and higher than 400 feet. A lot of their fields are in controlled airspace where they won't be allowed to fly.

Friends don't let friends depend on Google products.

Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one.

My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons.

Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's like pitching to a bunch of VCs, only you do it every month, and the amounts of money are much smaller.

And this is the reward for a lifetime of achievement. If you're starting at the bottom today, conditions are positively Dickensian. The average (not the maximum, the average!) PhD in CS took 6 years. During that time you'll be paid almost nothing, no matter what the cost of living is around you. And you are essentially an indentured servant of the professor. If he wants you to do a routine task that has nothing to do with your research, you have to do it. Cumulatively these tasks could add up to years of delays. After you graduate, you'll probably have to take multiple postdoc jobs, often at very low salaries, in hopes of getting a faculty position. Sometimes the hopes come true, but very often not.

And from what I understand, CS is actually one of the "good" subjects to go to graduate school for. Things are much, much worse in the humanities.

It's truly incredible that anyone would hold this up as a better system than how industry works. Hmm, let's see... a two week interview process, after which the company will tell the applicant whether they're hired. Or, a two year postdoc after which the university may choose to throw them away like garbage. Spending half your time writing grants, versus spending a few minutes a week writing a status report. Come on.

Also, the section about how "the students will suffer" from industry partnerships reads like a bad joke. Students suffer because the most universities hire faculty purely based on research, and not at all based on teaching. Full stop. The top research schools have contempt for teaching undergrads; that's why they hire adjuncts to do it at minimum wage. (Well, they also dump some of the burden on graduate students, too.)

Expect an insta-shutdown in a few months.

Yahoo hasn't had its own search engine for years. In 2010, they became essentially a frontend for Bing. In a later 2015 deal they switched the backend to using Google.

Duckduckgo is a metasearch engine, technically, but mostly it delegates to Bing.

As far as I can tell, there are only two and a half real search engines that still exist: Bing, Google, and Wolfram Alpha. (I count Alpha as a half because it's not really what most people are looking for.) I'm curious if anyone else knows of other real search engines still in existence.

Does this mean we can have more than 16GB in our laptops now?

Also, is "stratechery" named based on the old Celebrity Jeopardy skits on SNL?

The mind boggles at how the dongle mongerers hobbled these Mac models. From every new Mac, a tangle of dongles hang at odd angles. What a boondoggle.

I don't think "an entirely different ethical framework" should apply when you're "treating someone versus learning to treat them." First of all, "learning to treat someone" is not clearly separable from treating them. That's the whole point of medical residency-- you spend a bunch of time watching and helping doctors treat people, so that you can become one yourself. Ethical standards don't radically shift the moment a resident enters the room.

The concept is absurd. "Whoa guys! A resident just entered the room! Now we have to fill out all our forms in pen rather than pencil because the ethical standards just radically shifted! Now we're learning how to treat rather than treating!"

I think you are also missing one of the big points here, which is that the study protocol was exactly the same as what the doctors were doing anyway. So philosophical tangents like whether risks should be minimized more in research or treatment are irrelevant in this particular case. The risks are the same because the protocol is the same.

Scott's complaint is basically that the IRB regulations don't match the regulations that apply to standard psychiatric treatment.

For example, the department had a huge amount of patient information stored in their regular computer system. But the IRB demands an archaic pen and paper system for storing patient records, rather than using the computer system that exists. You could argue that maybe the department computer system was bad, but in that case it should be fixed, rather than creating a parallel system.

Similarly with the issue of consent. The doctors were already giving questionnaires to the patients and already using them to determine what the treatment should be (counselling, medication, etc.) Why do the consent requirements suddenly become completely different when it's part of a study? Should the doctors be asking patients to fill out a consent form each time they give a questionnaire? Should the forms be in pen, even though mental patients can use pends to hurt themselves? I don't know, but I do know that having bizarrely different criteria for a study versus normal medical practice seems unwise.

I agree that it would be good to have better-defined criteria for stopping the study. It sounds like Scott had an informal goal of 100 data points, but didn't manage to hit this goal.

I'm sure IRBs do some good. But it's really hard to take the IRB's side in this particular case. They weren't even following their own rules (the person asking him to take ethics training hadn't taken the training herself-- which would have probably torpedoed his study even if he had done everything else right.)

Yes, publishers do certainly value a platform that is able to combat privacy. Although lately the combat has been a little one-sided.

Python broke compatibility a lot more than once. Python 3.5 and Python 3.6 are not compatible, for example. There are even cases where code written for an older version of Python 3 will not work on a newer version of Python 3. For example, see PEP 479.

Now in Smell-o-Vision, so that you can really take in the "ambiance"

The part which really makes me angry is that this guy probably also employs graduate students who make minimum wage, have terrible health care, and no job security. But he doesn't feel like that's important enough to mention.

The cheap jabs are all incorrect, as well. Any compiler from the last 10 years will warn you if you don't match your printf format string to the arguments. printf also supports reordering arguments using the %m$ syntax (read the man page). And yes, you can extend printf with your own types.

A better guide to using strings in C++ is here: https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/io.html

I guess my feeling could be summed up as: bye, flash! We in the Mac/Linux sphere won't miss you.

It would be better if they installed two turntables and a microphone.

And yet, the countries which had sweatshops, like China, India, Vietnam, etc. have had huge success in bringing their population out of poverty. The countries which didn't, like most of Africa, did not. Population growth also tends to go down with industrialization, not up. So you are basically completely wrong when you say that sweatshops trap people in poverty.

Speaking of wrong... Suicide rates per capita are also higher in many rich countries than in many poor ones. It's the "per capita" part that people don't understand. Foxconn literally has 1,300,000 employees. At the standard US rate of 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year, we should expect 169 suicides at Foxconn per year. But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's a crisis, because math is hard.

Despite your disgust with the poor, no major pathogen of the last few decades has been traced back to sweatshops. AIDS and Ebola came from people interacting with apes, not from factory workers. Bird Flu came from birds. So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.

We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the governments in these countries should be doing more to help. Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just that, ridiculous.

It's OK. A court in the US ruled that we should have jurisdiction there, so now we do.

Of course they wanted to use PEX. It's cheaper and easier for them to install, since they don't have to solder anything. But there are definitely some concerns about PEX. http://www.calpipes.org/ProtectingCalifornians_PEX.asp It leaches a lot of chemicals which may or may not be harmful, but which certainly do cause an odor. It is permeable to some pesticides, oil, gasoline, and benzene. It is not anti-microbial like copper is, which means you get biofilms. If it's exposed to sunlight for two weeks (perhaps because some contractor left it outside), its chlorine resistance disappears. It is not recyclable, and makes toxic smoke when it burns. But it is 1/3 the cost. Your choice.

New stuff is not all PEX. Some people prefer copper because of its anti-microbial properties and because it's a known quantity that has been used for a very long time. PEX was only even approved in California in 2009, and there was a lawsuit about the stuff it was leaching into the water. Whether it's safe is controversial. Whether it's stinky is not-- PEX causes the water to smell bad. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q4/drinking-wa...

Also, nobody cares what sewer pipes are made of. Cast iron is a popular choice, but it could be just about anything, since you're not drinking the water (one hopes.) In California, they even used to make them out of pressed wood pulp and pitch in the 1960s... another wonder material that turned out to be not so wonderful in the long term... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_pipe

I guess it was still better than cement-asbestos pipe, though. Which is still used to supply tap water in some cities. :( Another wonder material of a bygone era.