You may ask: “what about ‘Under God?'”
When I was growing up, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance every day. “One nation, under God, indivisible . . .” at first, I just went with it. Then I began to wonder why an Atheist should profess to “one nation, under God” . . . if I didn’t believe in God, wasn’t swearing that my nation was “under God” dishonest? Really, didn’t saying “one nation, under God, indivisible” basically negate, for an Atheist, the entire pledge? Was I lying? Was I being disloyal? (more…)
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These days when America’s leaders are trying to make the place look more “Christian” I worry a bit because old-fashioned Christianity has from time to time endorsed the torture and murder of non-Christians. (more…)
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So, I’ve been playing with AdSense for a few months now. It seems I earn about $5.00 per month. June was a mere $4.80.
But Google gives me plenty of stats, and I have calculated that I could earn my current salary through AdSense if I can boost my page views to 642 million per day.
I think ratchet would melt under the strain of 7,500 hits per second. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
From: Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com>
To: themail@newyorker.com
Subject: Those Little Subscription Cards
Hello,
For generations, our species has been plagued by little slips of paper that fall out of magazines like The New Yorker when we are trying to read. This is very distracting, as the environmentally conscientious reader must bend down and pick these off the ground, and carry them over to the paper recycling bin. (more…)
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There’s a phenomenon called Hubbert’s Peak, named for the guy who correctly predicted that once the United States had consumed half of its oil reserves, that increasing demand would combine with diminishing supply to push prices steeply upward. From my reading, I have found that this prediction worked out domestically, but the oil prices didn’t shoot up because we have been successful at importing oil from overseas.
The really interesting Hubbert’s Peak, is when the world’s oil reserves will pass the 50% mark, at which point, unless we successfully adopt alternative energy, the oil prices will definitely shoot up a great deal, and they will never, barring a crash in the world economy, come down. I have read in a few places, that most predictions place that between between now and 2025 or so, 2012 seems to be the median. Some good advice I read said not to trust oil company estimates, because they try to over-estimate their reserves to improve their stock prices. There’s a decent chance that we are already at, near, or just a bit past, the peak: (more…)
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The flag stands for our nation, and its values, including Freedom of Speech.
Our men are dying in Iraq, and our nation and our planet have far more serious problems than flag burning. Our nation is run by crooks who write laws to please whomever pays them the most. We are sacrificing our moral superiority by torturing people, many of whom turn out innocent, and Osama bin Laden is still on the lose, and you have the cojones to tell me it is illegal to be unpatriotic?
If the jingoistic idiots running our nation do manage to pull off that flag-burning amendment, I will only be able to conclude that our nation is in fact in deep sh_t, and the only adequate way to express that will be by burning the flag in public.
Unless I’m a big chicken.
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When Yayoi and I got married, we wanted to collect whatever wisdom our families had to offer on living together, translate it into English and Japanese, and have it available at the ceremony. That project kind of fell through, but we have some material and I want to keep it somewhere accessible. So, why not share with the Innernet? (more…)
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<Adam> pickle.dump((self.dsId, dict((key, self.index[key].tolist()) for key in self.index)), open(path, ‘w’))
<Adam> Wow. Just when I was beginning to think that Guido’s plan to use structure-as-syntax was going to force nice readable structure on everyone, my hopes are dashed.
<meekay> People are still writing sh_tty code.
<Adam> And I deal with it!
<dman> That’s python?
<dman> I thought the whole point of Python was to make code like that impossible.
<Adam> Well, it’s the traditional “one in n lines of code contains a bug, so I’m going to reduce the number of lines in order to keep bugs out” thinking.
<Adam> Ironically, the kid who wrote that is my coworker who apparently had an offer from google and turned it down last year.
<meekay> I actually espouse that belief.
<meekay> Of course, if you get to the point where you’re writing obfuscated Perl in Java, you’re being counter-productive.
<Adam> I think, however, that a distinction needs to be made between “one in n operations contains a bug” and “one in n lines of code”.
<Adam> Packing more operations into one line just means that you’re making the bugs harder to untangle.
<Adam> And the code harder to parse for my poor little brain.
* Adam dumbass. Likes to stay that way.
<meekay> The pattern is not typically x bugs per n lines of code across the industry.
<meekay> It is typically a solid average x bugs per n lines of code per developer.
<meekay> And some developers have a lower x than others.
<dman> Adam: Greater bug density!
<meekay> I, for example, try to keep x very low.
<meekay> And by doing so, I am more productive.
<meekay> Because my coworkers bug queues typically have size five or six, and I typically have size two.
<dman> I think if the operation is a no-brainer, that stuff is okay, but you should reuse one of the lines you “saved” to drop a comment that will give the next sucker who has to maintain your code a friggin clue.
<meekay> Where “the next sucker” may in fact be you.
<meekay> =)
<meekay> I love it when my coworkers come and ask me about code that they wrote.
<dman> especially me, because i’m the SysAdmin, and when I start looking at the code, we’re already in trouble.
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I never do them.
But, somehow, I was oddly attracted to these. (Thanks, Keith!)
Which OS are You?
Which File Extension are You?
Damn.
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So, say you are writing a shell script (sh or bash) that needs to take arguments like so:
./script.sh start
./script.sh -v start
./script.sh -c foo.conf start
./script.sh -vc foo.conf start
This took me a bit of doing. (more…)
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Although I have not succeeded with the getting-hired-at-Google thing I have had my crack at it a few times and have survived to write about it. I occasionally hear from others about to try it, and they want to know if I have any advice. Here’s my modest wisdom on the subject of interviewing well at Google. (more…)
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