As a...
– user
I want to...
– ensure the developers behind the product have robustly debated the benefits of tabs vs spaces
So that...
– I get more value from the product
Be careful with this. I used to give aircraft simulator instruction and had to learn that AC backwards and forwards. Bottom line is it's not enough just to get a certified yoke and throttle quadrant. The entire package, hardware and software together, has to be "authorized," not just "certified." The instrument for this is a Letter of Authorization (LOA) that spells out exactly which kinds of currency/experience can be logged on that specific Aviation Training Device, and the approved aircraft configurations (e.g. SR20, PA-28R, BE-76). No LOA, no hours. If you can get a copy of the manufacturer's LOA, and the experience you want is in that letter, go for it! Otherwise, you've just got a very expensive video game.
Except as the author points out, we have more than just our own personal experience to go on. We have the experience of millions of college students, who, as the author notes, are not being dragged out in body bags by the thousands or even hundreds due to eating day-old pizza. Maybe the evidence isn't organized, easily referenced, or particularly well-controlled, but it exists, and to ignore it is just silly.
We're also talking about two different things here, one being the scientific method, the other being risk analysis. Output from the former can be an input to the latter but they're otherwise orthogonal.
On the subject of risk, I don't think the drunk-driving comparison holds because the numbers are completely different. We can point to innumerable cases of drunk-driving resulting in death. But day-old pizza? I'll be surprised if you can find (just picking a number out of my hat here) even ten cases of day-old pizza killing anyone.
That's fine for something a person is working on in their spare time, but when it's a multi-million dollar company whose mission statement is "we simplify the lives of developers who are making world-changing apps," I think it's fair to have different expectations.
> I feel sure that some of them also felt that they were, you know, continuing to move and shake and improve their lives whereas, from their perspective, I’d sort of given up — my life appeared to be a static thing, unchanging, and therefore pretty fucking boring
This is such a gross element of our culture—what's wrong with just living?—and I feel like it's not even really a matter of working vs. retired. I know folks who have worked the same job for decades, and they get the same harsh judgment from others as the author. But this used to be the norm! When did we switch into this thinking that we have to be constantly racking up gold stars in order for life to mean anything? Where did that idea come from?
There's passion, and then there's dirty fighting. Name calling and dismissiveness. A veritable army of straw men. Unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint.
Yeah, this blog post is a real drag. Ok, so you've been at this for a long time and are super smart and experienced. Great. That's not who Arduinos are for. They're for folks who want to use a microcontroller and don't want to have to worry about toolchains, bootloaders, and programmers.
Sorry, but you're wrong. There's nothing about regular expressions that means you have to use them to search for matching substrings. That's just one particular operation that uses regular expressions. It's not a quality inherent to regular expressions themselves. There are many different operations you can perform with a regular expression besides a substring search.
Python, for example, has a fullmatch method.[0]
libicu's matches() function returns true "if the pattern matches the entire string, from the start through to the last character."[1]
PCRE has various flags that change what it means for a regular expression to match, including PCRE2_ANCHORED and PCRE2_ENDANCHORED. Used together, these options would require a full match with no change to the regular expression itself.[2]
A full match has to exhaust all of the characters in the string. R*D*M* is indeed a match for a string of eight spaces, but it isn't a full match, because there are still eight spaces left over after matching.
And if they sell four? Wish I still had a copy but there was a brilliant story printed years ago called something like "there are numbers smaller than 1%." It illustrated the fallacy in the thinking behind saying things like, "even if we only sell 1%, we'll be rich." Just because you pick some arbitrarily small number as your minimum sales doesn't mean it's actually the minimum, or even the most likely minimum. You could sell a couple hundred. You could sell ten. You could sell zero.
99% of folks here don’t deal with life and death matters. When you do, you get a lot of practice at canceling, which helps. There’s also the fact that you can say, “if you do this, people will die,” which is a pretty bright line when you’ve got something to back it up. I actually found it more difficult to take a stand in less consequential fields. But it’s still very, very hard to look someone more powerful in the eye and tell them no. I’ve had to do it and it’s not fun. (Nothing on the scale of a Shuttle launch. I once had to effectively revoke a judge’s flying privileges, for instance.)
McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.
And some people like to have some peace in their own homes.
No one is picking on people for having a different life. I don’t care if people want to have lawns. I care if they run a goddamn engine right outside my home every single day of the week.
You can have your lawn. I really could not care less about it. What you can’t have is my acceptance of constant engine noise in the place where I live.
There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here.
- Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods.
- Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results.
- Yes, this is doing more than just detecting a person's race, age, and/or gender. The classifier is still accurate when they compare people with the same race, age, and gender. See Results.
If you want to discuss actual limitations in the study, here are some the author points out:
- "A more detailed picture could be obtained by exploring the links between political orientation and facial features extracted from images taken in a standardized setting while controlling for facial hair, grooming, facial expression, and head orientation."
- "Another factor affecting classification accuracy is the quality of the political orientation estimates. While the dichotomous representation used here (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) is widely used in the literature, it offers only a crude estimate of the complex interpersonal differences in ideology. Moreover, self-reported political labels suffer from the reference group effect: respondents’ tendency to assess their traits in the context of the salient comparison group."
Well that cuts to the quick.