They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

Customers care more about the value our application adds to their lives than the programming language or framework the application is built with. Visible Technical Debt such as bugs and missing features and poor performance takes precedence over Hidden Technical Debt such as poor test code coverage, modularity or removing dead code

In the real world — the time to pay off technical debt is scarce — in most of the time fueled by the fear of the unknown. The management loves to milk the cow but not to change the litter. The developers on another hand avoid modernizing legacy code — to avoid trouble in case anything breaks.

It can come as a refreshment to follow the hype and ride the bandwagon from time to time, but you should always do your research first.

The hype is something common in our industry. Remember NoSQL? Or when everyone went crazy over microservices? Or the AI / Machine learning burst? The list goes on and on. People get excited about new and breakthrough technologies and ideas.

The idea of having to learn something new is good, and I agree with that, but how often should you do that? Looking at the world of JavaScript, a new idea, blog post, library, framework, and whatnot pops up very often. Things become trending, and people quickly try to adopt that. I’m not saying you should not adopt new things and consider different approaches to a solution, not at all! I am trying to propose the idea of doing that less often.

Furthermore, incumbents who generally do a good job, often manage to continue reigning. According to Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital, who recently did a podcast on Invest Like The Best, large tech companies have managed to take even more market share than 10 years ago. Some people may argue this is because the large tech companies have improved their products over time to stay ahead due to their increased collection of data and better algorithms that feed on that data over time. That may be true for some companies but not all. This also applies to other products that have not made significant strides in their technology — Craigslist, Salesforce CRM, Turbotax, Quickbooks to name a few. Even Google Search which arguably had a better product in the 1990s compared to its peers is about on par with alternative search engines today, but 90% of people worldwide still use Google. Old habits die hard, and distribution matters more than ever if you are just starting a business. It’s hard to topple incumbents who have strong distribution and already large audiences — even if you can build a much better product.

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

“the unexamined life is not worth living.

We share our labor of love

As a web designer, I hate that "log in" creates a visual space between the words. If you line up "Log In Register" - is that three links or two? This creates a Gestalt problem, meaning you have to really fiddle with spacing to get the word groupings right, without using pipe characters.

With more and more productivity apps creating their own messaging systems, users suddenly face a new problem: Multiple inboxes. You now have to check notifications in Github, Trello, Google Docs and half a dozen (if not more) other tools in your productivity stack.

I will have to look at code to be sure but the rule that */* trumps all is applied only when the request is not an ajax request. So if you are making ajax request then you should be good.

The problem is that opting out of mime type negotiation simply because there is a catch-all in there is wrong according to the specifications of HTTP.

In graph theory, a tree is a connected acyclic graph; unless stated otherwise, in graph theory trees and graphs are assumed undirected. There is no one-to-one correspondence between such trees and trees as data structure.

More information about CC and open licensing

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons by On the Commons

count_value

Stallman has also stated that considering the practical advantages of free software is like considering the practical advantages of not being handcuffed, in that it is not necessary for an individual to consider practical reasons in order to realize that being handcuffed is undesirable in itself.

Decentralized Social Networks vs. The TrollsDerek CaelinIn the summer of 2019, the alt-right social network Gab migrated to the decentralized "Fediverse" of social networks after being booted from mainstream financial services and hosting solutions. Almost immediately, Gab was met by a dedicated movement to isolate it. The movement was largely successful; within a year, the Gab CTO announced they would leave the Fediverse. This talk will cover how moderators, activists, and developers in the Fediverse used human moderators, strong moderation tools, representative codes of conduct, and no small amount of organization to promote healthy online spaces.We’ll review how some of the challenges faced by centralized platforms, which struggle with their own size and scale, have been addressed in networks of smaller, community run, more moderated servers. In the debate over how to make a healthier internet, the open platforms and open protocols in the model of the Fediverse may have some of the best resources to isolate bad actors, including Gab.

It’s understandable that in order to relax, users need to know they’re not being overheard – though there is a less playful side to this. If groups are perceived as a place to say what you really think, away from the constraints of public judgement or “political correctness”, then it follows that they are also where people turn to share prejudices or more hateful expressions, that are unacceptable (or even illegal) elsewhere.

The ongoing rise of WhatsApp, and its challenge to both legacy institutions and open social media, poses a profound political question: how do public institutions and discussions retain legitimacy and trust once people are organised into closed and invisible communities? The risk is that a vicious circle ensues, in which private groups circulate ever more information and disinformation to discredit public officials and public information, and our alienation from democracy escalates.

WhatsApp groups can not only breed suspicion among the public, but also manufacture a mood of suspicion among their own participants. As also demonstrated by closed Facebook groups, discontents – not always well-founded – accumulate in private before boiling over in public. The capacity to circulate misinformation and allegations is becoming greater than the capacity to resolve them.

Then when giving answers I'm even less certain. For example I see occasional how-to questions which (IMO) are ridiculously complex in bash, awk, sed, etc. but trivial in python, (<10 lines, no non-standard libraries). On such questions I wait and see if other answers are forthcoming. But if they get no answers, I'm not sure if I should give my 10 lines of python or not.

I went against the grain, applying other tools that people have written over the years to directly perform the job at hand which do not involve entering a program for awk or a shell to run, with answers like https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/574309/5132 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/578242/5132 . Others have done similar. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/584274/5132 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/569600/5132 are (for examples) answers that show alternative tools to answers employing shell script and (yet again) awk programs, namely John A. Kunze's jot and rs (reshape), which have been around since 4.2BSD for goodness' sake!

There is an observable widespread tendency to give an awk answer to almost everything, but that should not be inferred as a rule to be followed, and if there's (say) a Python answer that involves less programming then surely that is quite on point as an answer for a readership of users.

Java may have been designed as a completely object oriented language, but when Java SE 8 was released in 2014, it added Lambda expressions (aka closures), which added some functional programming elements. Not every problem is best served by OOP, and by adding Lambdas, Java became more flexible. 

Ruby has some really nice libraries for working with linked data. These libraries allow you to work with the data in both a graph and resource-oriented fashion, allowing a developer to use the techniques that best suit his or her use cases and skills.

"that text has been removed from the official version on the Apache site." This itself is also not good. If you post "official" records but then quietly edit them over time, I have no choice but to assume bad faith in all the records I'm shown by you. Why should I believe anything Apache board members claim was "minuted" but which in fact it turns out they might have just edited into their records days, weeks or years later? One of the things I particularly watch for in modern news media (where no physical artefact captures whatever "mistakes" are published as once happened with newspapers) is whether when they inevitably correct a mistake they _acknowledge_ that or they instead just silently change things.

"AOO is not, and isn't designed to be, the 'super coolest open source office suite with all the latest bells and whistles,'" Jagielski continued. "Our research shows that a 'basic,' functional office suite, which is streamlined with a 'simple' and uncluttered, uncomplicated UI, serves an incredible under-represented community.

Due to social media, it's now easier than ever to make a defamatory statement. That's because social media services like Twitter and Facebook allow you to instantly "publish" a statement that can reach millions of people.

Lastly, in order for a statement to be defamatory, it must be unprivileged. You cannot sue for defamation in certain instances when a statement is considered privileged. For example, when a witness testifies at trial and makes a statement that is both false and injurious, the witness will be immune to a lawsuit for defamation because the act of testifying at trial is privileged.

The courts have called the web the most powerful communication tool on Earth, capable of making a person famous in a few minutes or destroying their reputation with a single click!

The meta charset information must also be the first child of the <head> tag. The reason this tag must be first is to avoid re-interpreting content that was added before the meta charset tag.

If you have worked with emails before, the idea of placing a script into an email may set off alarm bells in your head! Rest assured, email providers who support AMP emails enforce fierce security checks that only allow vetted AMP scripts to run in their clients. This enables dynamic and interactive features to run directly in the recipients mailboxes with no security vulnerabilities! Read more about the required markup for AMP Emails here.

The carefully crafted Medium story can give the appearance that- at the nadir of your professional life- you are above it all, you are concerned about others, and you are a soulful human being moving on to an even more lucrative future.

the role of the teacher

These seem to be better reasons to support sub-nanosecond resolution. I think either storing picoseconds or storing sec fraction as 64-bit integer are better approaches than storing a rational. However, either change would be very invasive, and it seems unlikely to be worth the effort.

Performance optimizations are not free. They ALWAYS come with a cost but do NOT always come with a benefit to offset that cost.

Even having useCallback() returning the same function instance, it doesn’t bring any benefits because the optimization costs more than not having the optimization.

We need to teach youth to fish for mentors and we need to stock the pond with more mentors.

This model is the most flexible and open-ended of the four; your goal as an instructor is not to design a full-fledged semester of material, activities, and assessments. Rather, your goal is to work with your class to design and become a learning community, working collaboratively and individually towards your determined learning goals. For this to work you should have: a set of possible/preferred learning objectives for your classa library of course materials, preferably with as much as possible in digital formata suggested list of digital tools and technologies that you’re comfortable from with a list of possible assignment/project/assessment ideas that are related to your learning objectivesa willingness to experiment and invite your students into the teaching & learning process. At the onset of class you will need to facilitate a conversation among you and your students about how the class will unfold. This can be done in small groups f2f, via an online communication tool, or in a hybrid mix of both. As a community you should plan on addressing the following: what are our objectives as a learning community? what kind of work could we engage in to meet these objectives? what physical/virtual spaces would we like to work in? how/when do we want to meet in these spaces?how do we want to measure (assess) if an objective has been met?what rules and policies should govern our work? how will we work virtually and respect everyone’s boundaries and personal situations? how will we work f2f and respect public health recommendations and personal situations? You will probably need to spend at least the first 1-2 weeks answering these questions together and then designing a plan for your course. Make sure you and your students talk through various complications: what if the university’s policies about meeting f2f change? what if classes are forced to move entirely virtual/remote? what someone (students or professor!) gets sick?

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Finally, these are NOT meant to be comprehensive. Instead, imagine these models along a continuum of opportunity. Your challenge is to determine where your courses could fit between and among the proposals.  

While the modifying version will occasionally be useful, in general, we should gently push people towards using non-modifying code.

Some may say that copied/not-copied goes without saying. I agree with Tallyrand: "If it goes without saying, it goes all the better for saying it."

So when Avdi took to air some of those grievances on Twitter, the natural thing happened that always happens when you feel your work is attacked: The core contributor group got defensive! That’s a mischaracterization! Where are the completed bug reports!? You know the drill, if you’ve ever worked on something, poured your heart into it, and then seen it criticized online. There’s that immediate, knee-jerk reaction of a sting. But it doesn’t have to sting.

Prefactoring is the application of experience to the creation of new software systems. Its relationship to its namesake refactoring is that lessons learned from refactoring are part of that experience.

Prismatic gets a percentage of the revenue increase that it generates for publishers, while developers pay a flat monthly fee based on usage, Cross says. It’s still working out pricing for hedge fund API usage. (As a point of comparison, the revenue model for the old Prismatic was the same as the current model for publishers. “We just meant for it to be more like Adsense/Adwords where we ran all this in our own consumer products too,” Cross notes.)

pattern of conflict modulation during one correct response is 489 orthogonal to the pattern during another correct response

higher when Ericksen conflict was present (Figure 2A)

with Ericksen conflict than it was for trials without Ericksen

AUC

amplification hypothesis, conversely, does not predict a unified conflict 341 detection axis in the population. Instead, it makes a prediction that is exactly contrary to 342 the epiphenomenal view: that conflict should shift population activity along task-variable 343 coding dimensions, but in the opposite direction. That is, conflict is predicted to amplify 344 task-relevant neural responses

At the population level, then, the epiphenomenon hypothesis330 predicts that conflict should decrease the amount of information about the correct response 331 and shift neuronal population activity down along the axis in firing rate space that encodes 332 this response

Neurons that were tuned for a specific correct response were 298 often tuned to prefer the same Simon/Ericksen distractor response

neurons did not encode the distractor response

significant 270 proportion of neurons were selective for the correct response

Furthermore, the population of cells whose responses were significantly 244 affected by Eriksen conflict was almost entirely non-overlapping with the population 245 significantly affected by Simon conflict (specifically, only one cell was significantly 246 modulated by both)

additive model was a better fit to the data than other, more 205 flexible models

(n=15/145) neurons had significantly different firing rates between Simon and no-196 (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprintthis version posted March 15, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.14.991745doi: bioRxiv preprint

A small number of individual 187 neurons also had different activity levels on Eriksen conflict and no conflict trials (8.2%, 188 n=12/145 neurons, within-cell t-test)

activity was higher on Ericksen conflict 185 trials than on no conflict trials

4917.0 (1) 5826.5 (1)*

Subtracting this expectation from the observed pattern 723 of activity left the residual activity that could not be explained by the linear co-activation 724 of task and distractor conditions

As an engineer, it’s important to explore different technologies. It’s important to identify the tools available to tackle problems. And it’s important to expand your horizons because then you can look cool on your CV.

More information about the Commons

The web is an amazing tool in bringing us together. Yet some of the best and brightest minds of our generation are working on how to get more people to click on ads. Imagine what technology could be capable of if it focused all that energy on the problems in our communities instead.

Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

A well-formatted and descriptive commit message is very helpful to others for understanding why the change was made, so please take the time to write it.

can we please stop jumping onto political bandwagons?

Some large tech behemoths could hypothetically shoulder the enormous financial burden of handling hundreds of new lawsuits if they suddenly became responsible for the random things their users say, but it would not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States. Tech companies and organizations may be forced to relocate, and new startups may choose to begin in other countries instead.