Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Coming in at a mere 45 pages, this should be top of your summer reading list.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2019 19:59

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 17:15

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

It's a context free language. Emulate a pushdown automaton and move on with your life.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2019 04:28

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The number of people who really understand monads is far smaller than the number of people who sound like they do.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 01:41

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Elegant error handling with the JavaScript Either Monad

This is a good introduction because it doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what monads are in general, and it shows you how to use one to solve a real problem.

The error handling methods that you get out of functional programming are good and people should be paying attention to them.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2019 04:47

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Qwertycoatl posted:

They talk about a growing range of needs they can't get from existing libcs, but don't say anything at all about what those needs are. I wonder why they want to reinvent this particular wheel.

Their library developers need something to do.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2019 21:32

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

strlcpy is the preferred alternative to strcpy. It's not part of the standard, but it's generally available.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2019 23:01

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

And of course Google, back when it was just Google, wasn't a new idea.

There were search engines before Google, but building a search engine based off PageRank was a genuinely new idea. That's why they cornered the market.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 19:25

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

We really need a "but ephebophilia!" smily.

No. No, we don't.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 02:59

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/mike_conley/status/1149845391153737728

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 15:32

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/rickhanlonii/status/1149868394881015808

# ¿ Jul 14, 2019 16:23

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Functional programming is much easier to learn if you don't have to unlearn imperative programming first. I think the transition from functional to imperative isn't as bad, but I'm not so sure about that.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2019 04:19

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Qwertycoatl posted:

My "fav" was a code mis-execution cpu bug that went away when run in the debugger

There's nothing quite like sidestepping a complicated and horrible crash at application shutdown with a sleep(500).

# ¿ Jul 18, 2019 15:06

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

US schools are slowly coming around to the idea that CS and SE should be different programs, but I think it'll still be another decade or so before there's consensus, and after that it's still going to take a while to switch programs.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2019 00:41

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Ola posted:

"Professor" is supposedly a synonym for "teacher" in most western higher education institutions, but most professors sadly think that teaching is the tax they have to pay in order to fund their ridiculous pet project, so they spend zero effort getting good at it.

This is a fairly common misconception but it's very wrong. In theory, a professor's job duties are roughly 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. In practice, this varies considerably by university. In a major research university, grants (i.e., money for research) are a very large part of the university's income, so someone who's bringing in that money can get away with a lot, and someone who isn't will be shown the door in short order.

At least in the US, there are institutions where teaching is much more important, but even the professors there are expected to contribute to their academic field.

ultrafilter fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jul 19, 2019

# ¿ Jul 19, 2019 02:14

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

University classes last for one semester at most. That means that there are some pretty hard limits on how large a project you can have attached to a single class, and that places some limits on what you can effectively teach. Yes, you can talk about version control, and testing, and object-oriented design, but those are all things that don't really show their value until you're working on a big piece of software. Those are things that you really can only learn on the job.

Theory probably isn't all that relevant to most jobs, but it is relevant for anything you want to do at scale, and the best jobs are moving in that direction. In addition, it might be the case that your job would be made easier by a piece of theory that you don't know. No one's going to be teaching basic science to their employees, so university really is the ideal place to cover that.

In short, you can't get a complete education from a single source. You need to learn some things in school, and you need to learn other things elsewhere.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 19:06

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

leper khan posted:

I don�t know how to get through the political mire to slow everyone down enough for us to move faster though.

If you figure it out, let me know.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 23:18

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

redleader posted:

see also: names, dates, times, writing (may god have mercy on the unicode committee)

The single biggest book I've ever seen was a hardcopy of the unicode 4.0 standard. I can only imagine that it's gotten worse.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2019 14:47

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

New code can be legacy code if it's written badly enough.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2019 14:48

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

If illuminated manuscripts were good enough back then, they're good enough now.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2019 01:29

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

At one point the standard was that the number on the progress bar should be what percentage would be done after the current step. Some people never moved on.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 14:54

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The animated gif progress bars make people think that things are getting done faster despite the complete lack of information.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 20:31

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/dataandpolitics/status/1163893697718525955

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 01:24

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Is there anybody who does mostly PRs? I'm not even sure how that would work.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 01:10

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

canis minor posted:

My previous company - the myth: "we're doing Machine Learning to track which routes are profitable, so that our network of connections adapts itself to demand"; the reality - meet Bob, Bob will download a database as a CSV, open it on a custom purchased machine that has loving water cooling and all the fancy specs to handle the amount of data that has to be imported into Excel, make alterations to what the routes should be on given days and how should they be priced, then will upload it to the server.

That's my most recent Excel related horror story

# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 00:35

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

An unsupported claim isn't an argument.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2019 05:17

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Git Koans

quote:

A Python programmer handed her ~/.gitconfig to Master Git. Among the many lines were the following:
code:
[alias]
; Explicit is better than implicit.  If we want to merge
; we should do so ourselves.
pull = pull --ff-only
Master Git nodded. �git pull origin master,� said the programmer.

Master Git pulled down the latest changes on master and automatically merged them with the programmer�s changes.

�But Master Git, did I not say to only fast-forward in my configuration?!� she cried.

Master Git looked at her, nodded, and said nothing.

�Then why did you not warn me of a problem with my configuration?� she asked.

Master Git replied: �there was no problem.�

Months later the programmer was reading git --help config for a different reason and found enlightenment.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2019 01:19

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/noop_noob/status/1183234844534304769

# ¿ Oct 14, 2019 01:11

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic

# ¿ Oct 16, 2019 15:35

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Silicon Valley pioneered self-driving cars. But some of its tech-savvy residents don�t want them tested in their neighborhoods.

quote:

Karen Brenchley is a computer scientist with expertise in training artificial intelligence, but this longtime Silicon Valley resident has pangs of anxiety whenever she sees Waymo self-driving cars maneuver the streets near her home.

The former product manager, who has worked for Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, wonders how engineers could teach the robocars operating on her tree-lined streets to make snap decisions, speed and slow with the flow of traffic and yield to pedestrians coming from the nearby park. She has asked her husband, an award-winning science-fiction author who doesn�t drive, to wear a shiny vest while cycling to ensure autonomous vehicles spot him in a rush of activity.

The problem isn�t that she doesn�t understand the technology. It�s that she does, and she knows how flawed nascent technology can be.

Read the whole article. It's good.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2019 01:07

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

A lot of Americans are anti-public transit because it benefits poor black people.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2019 03:04

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Algorithm Aversion: People Erroneously Avoid Algorithms after Seeing Them Err

quote:

Research shows that evidence-based algorithms more accurately predict the future than do human forecasters. Yet when forecasters are deciding whether to use a human forecaster or a statistical algorithm, they often choose the human forecaster. This phenomenon, which we call algorithm aversion, is costly, and it is important to understand its causes. We show that people are especially averse to algorithmic forecasters after seeing them perform, even when they see them outperform a human forecaster. This is because people more quickly lose confidence in algorithmic than human forecasters after seeing them make the same mistake. In 5 studies, participants either saw an algorithm make forecasts, a human make forecasts, both, or neither. They then decided whether to tie their incentives to the future predictions of the algorithm or the human. Participants who saw the algorithm perform were less confident in it, and less likely to choose it over an inferior human forecaster. This was true even among those who saw the algorithm outperform the human.

So we would probably be OK with a change that made human drivers only kill 100 children per year, but if that same death toll comes from a self-driven car, it's a problem.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2019 17:03

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

quote:

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

There was no such thing as Holy Roman Empire, because it didn't exist.

It was not an empire, as the term "empire" had nothing to do with it, and it wasn't a state, as the term "state" had no meaning either.

No, the word "Holy Roman Empire" had the same meaning as the word "empire," but it had nothing to do with Rome, and it had everything to do with the German people.

It was a nation of Germans, who had been granted a territory by God and their Emperor.

They were the Holy Roman Empire.

"Holy Roman Empire!"

"Holy Roman Empire! Holy Roman Empire!"

"Holy Roman Empire, holy Roman Empire!"

In terms of the project's actual goals, it needs some work. But as is, it's perfect.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2019 20:11

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Yeah. I thought about switching a long time ago but that was before the scipy stack was compatible, and that was a dealbreaker for me.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2019 01:57

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Doc Hawkins posted:

the current target of my mild ire is nullthrows, a completely unnecessary external dependency that doesn't even do its job well

no points for guessing that it's javascript
code:
function nullthrows(x, message) {
  if (x != null) {
    return x;
  }
  var error = new Error(message !== undefined ? message : 'Got unexpected ' + x);
  error.framesToPop = 1; // Skip nullthrows's own stack frame.
  throw error;
}
that's it

that's the whole package

Isn't the only thing it can print "Got unexpected null"?

# ¿ Nov 27, 2019 01:03

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Magissima posted:

Haskell can technically be written with semicolons (and brackets) instead of indentation but I've never seen it used in the wild. It's useful in the REPL though.
code:
foo :: Double -> Double;
foo x = let {
  s = sin x;
  c = cos x;
  } in 2 * s * c

That just looks so wrong.

https://twitter.com/zkat__/status/1204188153008906240

ultrafilter fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Dec 10, 2019

# ¿ Dec 10, 2019 06:22

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/_taylorswope/status/1205252714680045568

# ¿ Dec 13, 2019 16:08

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

rt4 posted:

"Frontend" is such a weird description. It's as if there's normal programmers and then a group of people who somehow only know Javascript.

That's not wrong.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 16:14

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1215331352352034818

It's pretty interesting but absolutely qualifies as a coding horror.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2020 02:09

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/vamchale/status/1215787244633628672

# ¿ Jan 11, 2020 01:58

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 17:15

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/jxxf/status/1219009308438024200

# ¿ Jan 20, 2020 07:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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