XKCD: It's more than a comic

Off-topic tip: last night I discovered xkcd2, a mirror site set up in the way a fan would rather have the comic presented, most notably with the alt text exposed. When on mobile, you can switch to xkcd2 and see the alt text by only adding one character to the address instead of two to go to m.xkcd.com.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I had a hearty hearty laugh at the Arcane Bullshit.

The Alt Text was especially funny.

Apocalypse: Dirge Of Swans.

I'm still just at the point where I learned enough to break some of the things most of the time, and often don't know how to fix them.

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

Being as concise as possible is crucial when you have very limited space, though. If your programming gets too "wordy", it may become sluggish to run.

Optimism is a duty.

That's not necessarily true, though it depends on language. Compiled languages (C, C++, Java etc.) can optimize your code so that longer doesn't necessarily mean slower. It also helps a lot to have meaningful names for variables (instead of a, b, c, i, j, k) and those don't slow down your code a bit.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

In that case, you should definitely write descriptively, then. I remember from my programming courses that that is best practice in software engineering these days, and I agree. There's nothing worse than trying to decipher someone else's cryptic letter soup of a program, especially when they are too lazy to add documentation in place.

edited 23rd Apr '16 11:18:44 AM by Redmess

Optimism is a duty.

I go back and forth on the "the compiler will fix it" line of logic. On one hand, yeah, today's compilers make it so that you don't have to worry so much about whether to unroll loops, or how to handle an if-statement that only fires off 10% of the time. And garbage collection has become awfully good... Still, much like anti-lock brakes and cruise control, it can lead to people paying less attention and trusting to the system to prevent accidents.

Indeed. Well-written code shouldn't need a lot of comments or documentation to understand what it does. You should just be able to read through and follow what it's doing. I'd much rather have variables like int numberOfSomeObject than int x, because what the hell is int x.

Garbage collection is a two-edged weapon. It can simplify writing code a lot, but can also slow down your program. A good rule of thumb is that in a computiationally intensive program, never create objects in the main loop. Especially if you are writing a game. Do you know how annoying it is when the game hangs for a few tenth of a second every other second? Granted, Java and C# are not good languages to write games in anyway (Python doubly not for several reasons). I like C++ better in this. You have to know how to manage your resources, but with smart pointers you can offload most of its burden to the computer while still being more efficient than GC, and you can fine-tune it if necessary. You still have to pay more attention though even if you use smart pointers everywhere.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

Iteration counters are exempted, though. Everyone can figure out int i, i++

And here I'm taking online courses in making games with C# D:

edited 24th Apr '16 12:32:18 PM by Ninety

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

I mainly write business data handling programs in languages like VBA, DB2, and ABAP (though I'm fairly new at the latter). Since continuity is a huge issue (both for myself and for anyone else trying to use my code), I try to internally document everything as much as possible and standardize my use of variable names and whatnot throughout an application. For example, in Access-VBA, I use "fForm" as a standard name for a variable referring to a Form object, "strForm" for a string variable that stores the name of a form, and so on. Every major operation is liberally commented. Since the performance of VBA itself is virtually trivial compared to the database operations that it runs, there is rarely a need to sweat code optimization, except in the normal places you'd expect, like looping structures.

edited 24th Apr '16 12:44:18 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I do like using inline conditions for my part, even if it's maybe a bit less clear. Why write :

foo = None  
if bar() :  
    foo = a  
else :  
    foo = b 

when you can write :

foo = a if bar() else b

edited 25th Apr '16 3:33:05 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Inline conditionals are a component of most languages. Nothing wrong with it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Unless you start nesting them, with no parentheses for more fun.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

Money Problems.

Flora is the most beautiful member of the Winx Club. :)

He has a point. Meaning Randall.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Seriously, is it so hard? Jackson wasn't even a very good president. The only reason people remember him is because he was crazy and a dick to the natives.

*wry grin* Some of it is inertia, some of it is racism, some of it is a kneejerk reaction to anything that could be seen as historical revisionism... It involves people, so it's complicated. I'm still amused at how Hamilton reversed the $10 decision.

Personally, I was pulling for Grace Hopper to be picked so that we had a representative of women in technology, but I can see why people would instead prefer a twofer of more ancient vintage.

The one thing I will give Jackson is the victory at the Battle of New Orleans. I think the US does owe him some recognition for that, despite his other failings. Still, I have no problems with the proposed redesign, and neither do any of folks I know personally in the Left or the Right.* Indeed, a number of Republicans are amused that the founder of the modern Democratic Party is being demoted.

• Aside from one friend that thinks we should not put people on currency, no matter who they are.

edited 25th Apr '16 11:07:54 AM by Catbert

Jackson's Democrats evolved from being slavery-supporting racists to being social liberals over the course of the mid-20th century.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Not American therefore out of the loop. What happened?

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

Meaning the thing with who is on the money or why we don't like Jackson? I don't know about the money myself, but Jackson is a very controversial figure and can be credited with such wonderful things as destroying the bank of America and ignoring treaties with the Cherokee and other tribes before sending them on death marches which killed a lot of them. The latter also involved completely ignoring supreme court rulings saying he couldn't do that. Congress too, I think? And I think he might have killed some people in duels.

edited 25th Apr '16 11:18:46 AM by Arha

Jackson was a genocidal asshole of a US president, he's currently on the $20 bill, a petition was made to replace him (as he's an asshole) with a women (because there are no women on notes).

It got complicated because the treasury have a schedule for what note get suspected when, and they seem to be super attached to it. So instead of replacing Jackson they were going to replace the guy on the 10, but people like him, so they were going to have the guy on the 10 share it with a women, but again people thought this was stupid, so eventually they decided to just got with the original idea of replacing Jackson.

But they're not changing the schedule, so the 10 is still going to be redone first, also apparently Jackson is going to stay on the 20 but in the back, for some reason.

Short version: Petiton to replace racist on money with women on money, seems simple but bureaucracy makes it complicated, much head into desking ocures.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

It's also worth noting that the woman people want to replace Jackson with was black and played a major part in combatting slavery, making her an especially good choice, given that part of the point is shunning a racist.

"Canada Day is over, and now begins the endless dark of the Canada Night."

Demoting the guy on the front to the back was already part of the plan when they said they were going to do the ten. All those months back when they first announced they were going to put Tubman on the Ten, they announced they were moving Hamilton to the back and John Oliver commented that it's just like the patriarchy to give a woman half of what she asked for and insist that she share.

Oh, and relatedly, a few days ago Ben Carson, the why-is-he-still-running Republican who's black, said that he thought it was unreasonable to demand Tubman be put on the $20 and suggested they should give her the $2. Which you might notice is exchanging the most useful bill for the most useless bill. You might be surprised to learn that they've printed $2 bills as recently as 2013, because I don't know where they're all going since they barely circulate.

edited 25th Apr '16 5:07:48 PM by TParadox

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