|
Here's one that won't be appearing in the Insider, since it's only tangentially related to programming:
The whole world is suddenly talking about election pundit Nate Silver, and as a longtime heckler of Silver I find myself at a bit of a loss. These days, Silver is saying all the right things about statistical methodology and epistemological humility; he has written what looks like a very solid popular book about statistical forecasting; he has copped to being somewhat uncomfortable with his status as an all-seeing political guru, which tends to defuse efforts to make a nickname like “Mr. Overrated” stick...
The situation is that many of Nate Silver’s attackers don’t really know what the hell they are talking about. Unfortunately, this gives them something in common with many of Nate Silver’s defenders, who greet any objection to his standing or methods with cries of “Are you against SCIENCE? Are you against MAAATH?” If science and math are things you do appreciate and favour, I would ask you to resist the temptation to embody them in some particular person. Silver has had more than enough embarrassing faceplants in his life as an analyst that this should be obvious.
Cash indicts Silver's work on PECOTA as "a glutinous mass of Excel formulas," "large, complex, and full of creaky interactions and pinch points" with a "copious lack of documentation." Then he throws out a few edge-case misses in the analysis...
I dunno. Sounds like a typical software project to me. And it works, so... what's the problem?
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
|
|
|
|
|
All statistical models are approximations and are subject failure when stressed in unexpected ways.
What I got from this blog was that while Colby Cosh agrees with most of what Nate Silver has said, Nate has been wrong in the past so no one should listen to him now. This sounds petty and envious. Now I am no Nate Silver acolyte, but anyone who shuts up the idiotic pundits is okay with me; however, if you think that Nate Silver, or anyone else for that matter, is a modern day Cassandra, then you need to go back to astrology or phrenology lest you become like those who spent over $300 million on the last Cassandra, Karl Rove.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
|
|
|
|
|
Michael Bergman wrote: All statistical models are approximations and are subject failure when stressed in unexpected ways.
Every abstraction is leaky, due to the fact that it's an abstraction
|
|
|
|
|
As developers, we start exploring any new platform/framework/language with a traditional “Hello World” program. Windows 8 is a re-imagined new OS, and so I thought let’s re-imagine the “Hello World” too. Consultant Jargon is my non-traditional version of “Hello World”. Pro tip: Invest in a good tile.
|
|
|
|
|
I have written in a previous post (What do you get from being a lock screen app?) about how your background processing has a limited amount of time to do it’s processing in, what the odd unit of measurement used (the CPU second) and the overflow bucket. Even with the thinking it is hard to understand what you can accomplish in the time available, so help let’s look at what an app I built (Bing my lockscreen) does in it’s time. You do get a decent amount of time and with careful planning you can do a lot!
|
|
|
|
|
Viewports are pretty easy on desktop: they're the browser window. Thus, an element with width: 10% will span 10% of the browser window, while width: 100px just means a width of 100px. On mobile, things are quite different. There are two viewports and three kinds of pixels, and they interact in all kinds of weird ways—ways that depend on the browser. In this technical presentation PPK will explain why a pixel is not a pixel, what the difference between the two viewports is, and which bits web developers should care about. Caution: Heads may explode! When the browser goes mobile, all bets are off.
|
|
|
|
|
I am a terrible programmer. I don’t comment my code very well. Sometimes I ignore the DRY principle. I tend not to use fancy tertiary statements, or worry too much about whitespace. My data structures can get ugly sometimes. But in other ways, I (dare I say it) am a pretty good programmer.... I think it’s clear that we have definitional problem: what makes a good programmer?
|
|
|
|
|
There is a difference between being a good programmer and a productive programmer.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
|
|
|
|
|
I'm afraid I disagree.
IMHO, a productive programmer is one who is able to implement a bug fix, enhancement or new feature quickly and correctly, while a good programmer is able to do the same thing while also generating code that's well written, easily understood and easily maintained.
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
I'm afraid you just described the difference..
|
|
|
|
|
Thank you.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
|
|
|
|
|
A good programmer IS a productive programmer.
|
|
|
|
|
Not necessarily. In some cases a good programmer is a lead or supervisor who enforces agreed upon coding styles so that anyone in the group can read, understand and modify the code with a minimum amount of effort.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
modified 8-Nov-12 23:26pm.
|
|
|
|
|
A good article, and IMHO the right conclusion:
Quote: Like most things in life, the answer to what a good coder is, is somewhere in between the guy who wants to get it out fast and the guy who wants to make it beautiful.
|
|
|
|
|
The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a step in the right direction. I recently shared with you 5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed in the hope that some of them would inspire you to improve your own web apps. I'd like to share with you 5 more lessor known HTML5 APIs -- hopefully you find some of them useful! But wait... there's more!
|
|
|
|
|
This will definitely be useful for the web project I'm doing.
Thanks for posting!
|
|
|
|
|
It seems like there is a lot of sentiment that VB6 is pretty much useless to learn anymore. I'm not sure I agree with that position personally, but I wanted to throw it out there and see what sorts of responses we got. I particularly want to explore reasons other than the "maintain the vast body of legacy code out there" reason. A couple of things that occur to me personally are the ease of creating and using COM objects, and the ease of creating wrappers for the Win32 API. Are you still using Visual Basic? Tell us why it rocks (or not)...
|
|
|
|
|
Waste of time to teach n00bs VB6: push them straight to C# or Java. Have not come across a legacy VB6 application in at least 10 years. Other than as a historical oddity it would be pointless to get someone programming by starting with VB6.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
|
|
|
|
|
I personally would push someone towards the new VB--VB.NET
However, when working with legacy apps, I could see the value of knowing VB6.
|
|
|
|
|
GeekForChrist wrote: However, when working with legacy apps, I could see the value of knowing VB6
Anyone who knows VB.NET is going to find their way around VB6 rather quickly.
I see no value in it whatsoever.
|
|
|
|
|
MehGerbil wrote: Anyone who knows VB.NET is going to find their way around VB6 rather quickly.
I know that, but I also know from my own experience that there's some things that I should know that are only VB6.
(I've been lost a few different times when reading VB6 )
|
|
|
|
|
mark merrens wrote: Waste of time to teach n00bs VB6: push them straight to C# or Java Lisp. FTFY
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
Learning a dead langauge (10 years out of maintenance) just for ease of COM use is ridiculous. VB6 had so many other real headaches that the COM bonus is wiped out by all the other FAIL. In short, you avoid a quickie COM headache but take on lung cancer - it's a bad trade.
Plus, every use I've seen for COM involves getting around limitations of VB6 that can be handled out of the box in VS2012 thanks to .NET and XAML.
|
|
|
|
|
I have to agree. Maybe I've been lucky so far, but doing COM in C# isn't really difficult. And for most common COM components* the work's already done for you, you just have to Google it.
*(I feel like that's a good start to a tongue twister... )
|
|
|
|
|